Rock Fall Net Design

Following a rock slide that closed a Canadian mainline railway, a railway company retained BGC to design and carry out rock slope stabilization. This included a large scaling and trim blasting program, followed by rock fall modelling, and design and installation of a 100 m long, 3,000 kJ rock fall net system. Particular challenges included:

• Difficult foundation conditions
• Multi-stakeholder issues
• Maintaining rail traffic flow during work
• Minimizing environmental effects of the scaling and blasting
• Worker safety

At the time of installation, the net system was only the second installation in North America of this capacity.