Big hole.

When I was down at Mum & Dad's at the weekend, my dad decided to take me to see North Tyneside's newest tourist attraction - the hole under the metro track.

The story goes something like this:

A hole opened up under the tracks at Northumberland Park on the Tyne & wear metro last week. The hole is into the top of the old mineshafts that litter the area. The local estimates for stabilisation and track re-opening were December.The issue seems to have been exacerbated by the 2005 opening of Northumberland park station (an island) which required the inner circle of track to be realigned around the island platform, and thus on this new alignment ran on an area previously not used for track.

The new Sainsbury's has a car park which gives a nice elevated vantage point over the hole, as can be seen from this picture.

Given that my sister's job is surveying the ground before people build on it, and spends her life either finding holes / mineshafts / soft rock, or pumping concrete in to fill up old mineworkings, my dad was getting rather excited that she might be sent to supervise the filling of this hole. Unlikely given she works in Dunfermline me thinks.