Update, 3 November, 9.17am Colombo — services restored. The Railway Control Room says Northern Line running has returned to normal. Details below.

Train services on the Northern Line have been temporarily suspended after the Deduru Oya burst its banks on the section between Wellawa and Ganewatta, the Railway Control Room said on Tuesday morning.

A team of technical officers has been sent to the site to inspect the track and assess the situation, NewsFirst reported. Hiru News carried the same account from the Railway Control Room, attributing the disruption to the overflow of the river across that stretch of line.

Wellawa and Ganewatta are adjacent stations in the Kurunegala district, on the stretch of the Northern Line that crosses the Deduru Oya basin. The Northern Line is the main rail link from Colombo to Anuradhapura, Vavuniya and Jaffna, so a blockage in that section severs the principal rail route to the north.

A day after the reservoir gates were opened

The overflow follows the release of water upstream. This desk reported on Monday that four spill gates at the Deduru Oya Reservoir had been opened by one foot each, discharging 2,800 cubic feet per second into the river, with the Irrigation Department warning riverbank residents downstream to stay alert and cautioning that levels would fluctuate while the gates remained open.

Neither filing on the rail suspension states whether the discharge is a direct cause of the overflow at Wellawa, and the two events should not be assumed to be linked without that confirmation — but they fall a day apart on the same river, and the department’s warning covered exactly the downstream stretch now affected.

The rain has not eased. The Met Department’s forecast for Tuesday again puts falls above 75 mm at some places, and the Disaster Management Centre’s running count of damage from the late-October storm period stood at six dead, three missing and 745 damaged houses between 23 October and 1 November — figures that predate this week’s flooding.

Not reported

Neither outlet says how many services have been cancelled or held, whether trains are running on shortened sections to either side of the breach, whether alternative road transport has been arranged, or how long the inspection is expected to take. No restoration time has been given, and no estimate of track damage has been released. Ada Derana, which covers rail disruptions routinely, remained unreachable from this desk.

Update — 3 November, 9.17am Colombo: line reopened

Train services on the Northern Line have been restored to normal, the Railway Control Room said, according to Hiru News. The filing attributes the earlier disruption to the Deduru Oya overflow and runs to two sentences.

The suspension therefore lasted roughly three hours, measured from the first Hiru filing at 6.09am Colombo time to the restoration notice at 9.17am.

The notice does not say whether the track required repair or whether the water simply receded, does not give a speed restriction over the affected section, and does not address the fate of services cancelled or held during the closure. No damage assessment has been published.

Upstream, the position worsened on the same morning even as the line reopened: the Irrigation Department opened eight spill gates at the Deduru Oya Reservoir at 8.04am, double the four reported on Monday, with a renewed warning to people downstream.

Sources