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Regular viewers of this channel will know I'm more likely to pour scorn on hyperbole and nitpick grand superlative claims than make that kind of claim myself, but on this occasion I might risk it: this is surely one of the most scenically spectacular stretches of railway in the country. Skirting rugged sea cliffs one minute, then the next gliding down a lushly wooded river valley, I wanted an excuse to show you lots of nice footage of it, so today I'll tell you a bit about its history.
It was built by the Dartmouth and Torbay Railway company, which in many ways was a funny old beast. Despite the name, it failed to reach either Dartmouth or arguably the most significant town in Torbay around the time of its inception. It was originally designed by the celebrated engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, yet arguably the company owed its very existence to one of his greatest failures. That company lasted barely 15 years, and half of its line was deemed so unprofitable by British Railways as to be shut down, yet today is sufficiently profitable as a heritage railway that it rather unusually operates as a fully commercial concern, rather than a charitable effort relying on volunteers.
To pick apart some of these apparent contradictions, let's start at the beginning, with some historical and geographical context.
In 1844, the Bristol & Exeter Railway became the first railway to enter Devon, terminating at Exeter St Davids. In the same year, a company called the South Devon Railway gained parliamentary approval to connect Exeter, Devon's county town, with Plymouth, its largest city, and to cut a very long story short, this main line was basically completed by 1849.
In December 1848 they had also opened a branch line from Newton Abbot to serve Torquay, although somewhat confusingly for the purposes of this video, their Torquay station was not today's Torquay station. Their branch stopped a mile or more north-west of the town centre, harbour and seafront. Today, the station in that location is called Torre.
That the opening of this station was marked by a ceremonial special train full of bigwigs and a lot of speeches by company directors, the local MP and so forth, is rather unremarkable: exactly the same happens today, as anyone who watches Geoff will know. But these days, it's not so normal to make it a local holiday, with everybody getting the day off to pack the streets and share in 4834lb of meat being given away to the poor, which is what happened then.
However, as much as railways at this time could inspire this huge public excitement and celebration, they could equally inspire fervent opposition. The South Devon had originally intended their Torquay branch to continue to Paignton, Brixham and Kingswear, but had strong opposition from local residents fearing loss of access to their beaches had helped cut it short. Similarly, an 1852 proposal to extend to Torquay harbour met fierce protests from locals worried that "the hissing and snorting of the engine would... hasten the death of the invalids who resided here".
In truth though, it wasn't just public opinion dictating where the South Devon did and did not extend to. Their chief engineer, a certain Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had decided to tackle the relatively challenging, hilly terrain of south Devon by gambling on the novel atmospheric propulsion system. Rather than steam locomotives, this used static engine houses to create a vacuum in a tube which would draw trains along the track. On paper, it allowed trains to handle steeper gradients. In practice, to cut a very long story short, it didn't really work, meaning the SDR had spent half a million on experimental technology it ultimately had to scrap. They were, to use the technical term, skint. Plus they owned no locomotives, and were stuck with a line that was barely fit for purpose for locomotive operation.
Focusing on their own core problems rather than expanding to as yet unserved towns, some of whom were awfully keen on getting themselves a railway connection as soon as possible, therefore left a gap in the market for independent companies to step in, which is where we finally meet the nominal subject of this video, the Dartmouth and Torbay.
The 1850s had actually seen several different proposals for extension of the South Devon's Torquay branch, which had failed for various reasons I won't get too bogged down in, lest this video become too long. But in July 1857 the D+T finally gained approval for a line which would run from the existing Torquay station to a new station at Livermead, nearer the Torquay seafront, on to Paignton, and down to Kingswear, for ferry links to Dartmouth.
Now, I must admit, one of my biggest questions when I started researching this was frankly why anybody was quite so keen to build this line in the first place. I'd never questioned why anyone wanted to link London and Bristol, or indeed Birmingham and Manchester or such like, because that seems entirely self-explanatory. Big cities, big ports, big industrial output - hundreds of thousands of passengers and thousands of tons of cargo meant an obvious source of income from passenger fares and goods traffic. But this line offered approximately none of that.
I don't mean to sound in any way demeaning to Dartmouth. It is an extremely charming town, with an almost incomprehensibly pretty setting, and plenty of lovely historic architecture. But one thing it isn't, is big. In 1841 it had a population of about four and a half thousand people. And while Dartmouth's harbour was historically significant, especially in naval terms, it wasn't a major cargo port, and the town hadn't been particularly transformed by the industrial revolution either.
To the extent it did have industry, that was shipbuilding, and the thing about shipyards is that they really don't need railways to transport their finished product to the marketplaces of bigger cities. Somewhat by definition, their finished product can leave their premises by sea.
Paignton was a similar story: its population in 1851 was a little over 3000 and likewise lacked any significant industry to speak of, with an economy based on farming and fishing.
Of all the towns in the area, it was perhaps Brixham which had the strongest claim to 'needing' a railway. Its 1851 population of 5 and half thousand was bigger than Paignton or Dartmouth; indeed, until very recently it had been bigger than Torquay too. Its harbour hosted easily the biggest fishing fleet in the area - in fact to this day it's one of the most valuable fishing ports in England - providing the most obvious source of goods traffic for a would-be railway. Yet the D+T's proposal didn't actually connect to Brixham.
With this context, you can perhaps understand my confusion as to exactly why anyone was so keen to build the Dartmouth and Torbay in the first place. The directors of the D+T were evidently a bit more visionary and entrepreneurial than I am, because they were seeing things the other way around. Rather than building a railway to serve already large and thriving centres of population and industry, they envisaged the railway stimulating growth in population and industry.
At the ceremonial groundbreaking of their extension, which was also declared another local public holiday, a speech proclaimed that the new railway would soon result, "on the banks of Dartmouth, vast stores, vast docks, vast commerce, vast population". Given that the population of Dartmouth increased from a little under 5000 then to a little over 5000 today, it would perhaps be easy to snark at these bold predictions as wildly misplaced optimism. The truth is a bit more complicated to be fair.
After all, they had very good reason to believe huge growth could be stimulated. Torquay at the turn of the century had less than 1000 residents, far smaller than Brixham. But then it had become a fashionable resort and the population exploded: 6000 in 1841, eleven and a half thousand by 1851, the arrival of the railway helping it to add another 5000 the next decade, and the decade after that.
The Directors of the D+T were hardly unrealistic in thinking improved railway connections could facilitate similar growth across the Torbay and South Hams area. In fact, they were counting on it. They had, after all, put in an awful lot of the money for the scheme from their own pockets. The various failed attempts to extend the Torquay branch during the 1850s had lost their respective investors a fair bit of cash, meaning when it came to public buy-in for the D+T, enthusiasm was limited. The D+T's directors were, for the most part, major landowners in the region, who were personally bankrolling the new railway not because they expected to turn an immediate profit from ticket sales or goods traffic, necessarily, but because they believed it would stimulate the local economy in general, raising the value of land, allowing them to cash in indirectly.
This line of logic is obviously nothing new to me, per se. These days it's often labelled Transit Oriented Development, and the growth of London's tube is a very well-known historical example. The Metropolitan Railway famously extended its tracks not even to small towns but to completely empty fields, knowing that a metro line would precipitate house-building, often on land they owned, meaning a payday from the house builders, and even if they didn't profit from the house-building directly, said house-building would create fare-paying commuters for their line.
But 'Metro-land' was an early 20th century phenomenon, and a 'build it, and they will come' philosophy seems easier to have faith in when you're talking about London commuters, than attracting tourists to the Dart estuary in the 1850s. Hence my surprise at discovering the D+T's rationale. At any rate, build it they did.
In August 1859 a new Torquay station opened, with the old one being renamed Torre. Owing to my lack of time machine, I am not actually showing you this station, strictly speaking, but rather the rebuilt and much expanded station of 1878. As you can see, it's rather attractive, with what Historic England assert to be a 'French Chateau' influence to the architecture. To be honest, it's still not especially close to Torquay's town centre and harbour, but it is just a stone's throw from the beach at Torre Abbey Sands. As is so often the case, if the station couldn't come to the traditional heart of the town, the town was happy to grow toward and around the station, with the adjacent Grand Hotel, for example, opening in 1881.
August 1859 also saw the opening of Paignton station, which is something of an architectural let down, having really no coherent frontage at all these days. Paignton had a long standing tradition of baking enormous puddings for special occasions, and took the arrival of the railway as an excuse to cook an absolute whopper - 13 and a half feet in circumference, 5 foot tall, slightly over a metric ton in weight. Unfortunately, with estimates of between four and eighteen thousand people in attendance, many feared they might not get a slice, and a literal riot ensued as the public fought to ensure they got their piece.
By March 1861 the line had reached Churston Station, although at the time it went by the name Brixham Road; a classic piece of mildly deceptive railway company station naming, being as this was as close as the D+T got to Brixham. Fish, and indeed humans, therefore had to travel a couple of miles from Brixham by road in order to pick up the train here.
(A branch from here to Brixham was eventually built by another company, but for the purposes of this video I will be essentially ignoring that.)
It was not until 1864 that the line finally reached Kingswear, and even then only for passengers. Freight facilities took another couple of years to sort out, with the first goods trains running in 1866.
This final stretch took a while for several reasons. It's complicated, but I'll do my best to summarise and simplify...
Firstly, the D+T were short of cash. The truth is, they'd actually somewhat fudged their figures in the first place: knowing that they would struggle to raise money, they'd persuaded Brunel to underestimate the cost of construction so that the sums appeared to add up when presented to parliament.
I previously explained that many of the directors and major investors were local landowners who saw the railway as a medium to long-term pay day. The trouble was, many other local landowners saw the railway as a short-term payday, and demanded far higher sums from the railway to run across their property than they had budgeted for. They therefore had to seek out a new round of funding in 1862 to complete the line.
Secondly, there was some degree of indecision about exactly what route to take. Still faintly hoping to reach Dartmouth itself, and knowing that the Admiralty wouldn't allow a bridge over the Dart anywhere downstream of Greenway, they'd attempted to gain permission for a deviation from the planned line down to Kingswear, instead zigzagging through the Greenway estate to allow scope for potentially crossing the river there in future. This had met fierce opposition from the owner of Greenway and was ultimately defeated in parliament.
This in turn prompted Henry Seale, one of the original directors and fourteen times mayor of Dartmouth, to kick off, unhappy that they had seemingly given up on reaching his town. He had held the rights to the Floating Bridge ferry across the Dart, about a mile upstream from Kingswear, rights which included a legally-backed exclusivity on any other crossings within 3 miles.
To get around this, the D+T's original Act of Parliament had effectively transferred the floating bridge to the railway's ownership, giving Henry Seale £2000 worth of shares in exchange, but faced with him threatening to refuse to let the railway cross the turnpike road leading to the ferry, a road which he still owned, the D+T sold the ferry back to him for a mere £150, in exchange for him allowing them both to cross the road and to run their own ferry from Kingswear itself.
Like I said, complicated, and even once the financial and legal aspects were sorted, there was the not-so-small matter of the Greenway tunnel, the longest on the line, and a large viaduct shortly afterwards at Maypool, to construct. This viaduct is, incidentally, infuriatingly difficult to find a filming angle for - I had to take a bus, another bus, a ferry, another ferry, and then hike up a 150m hill in 25 minutes flat to find this vantage point, and while it is a spectacular view, I was frustrated to discover I could still only barely see a tiny fraction of the viaduct. And even then it was so windy up that hill that my footage is frustratingly sub-par, camera wobbling in the gusts.
But with these engineering challenges, plus a few smaller viaducts over various creeks on the east bank on the Dart, eventually finished, the Dartmouth and Torbay Railway was now complete.
Granted, the rails hadn't actually reached the eponymous Dartmouth, but they built a station there anyway, with a booking office selling through tickets including the ferry over to or from Kingswear. As with Torquay, I'm having to show you a later rebuild, this time from 1884. The building is now a restaurant. I wasn't drunk when filming this by the way: I was standing on the pontoon for the ferry.
Much as the cash-strapped South Devon Railway, during its struggles to get atmospheric propulsion working, had been forced to rent locomotives from the Great Western, so the D+T was itself too skint to actually buy and operate any actual locomotives to work its new line. The South Devon, therefore, did all the actual business of running trains, with income split between the two companies in ways far too complicated for me to get into here.
The Great Western, Bristol & Exeter, South Devon, and Dartmouth and Torbay Railways had all been overseen by Brunel, so had all been built to his broad gauge. In 1860, the London and South Western Railway, which was 'narrow gauge', or what we'd now call standard gauge, reached Exeter. In 1865 they proposed pushing on towards Plymouth, and the threat of this incursion into broad gauge territory prompted the South Devon to suggest amalgamating with the D+T. The D+T, by now grappling with expenditure and debts amounting to about three times as much as initially estimated, was only too happy to agree. Initially this took the form of a long term lease, signed in 1866, but by 1872 the two companies merged entirely.
The same story then quickly repeated itself on a larger scale, as in 1876 the South Devon arranged to lease itself to GWR for 999 years, before only two years later fully amalgamating with the Great Western.
The Dartmouth and Torbay, therefore, was extremely short-lived as a genuinely independent operation, becoming effectively just another GWR branch line within twenty years of opening.
My main source for this video, C. R. Potts' book The Newton Abbot to Kingswear Railway, spends an extraordinary amount of time detailing the many and varied accidents occurring during these early decades. You'll have to read the book if you want all the details, but what struck me was how they almost all followed the same pattern. Almost every one seemed to be because the 'policeman' - as signalling operatives were known at the time - made a mistake, and either set the points wrong, the signals wrong, or both. In fact, sometimes it wasn't even the policeman per se, but some other random bloke who'd taken over the task while the actual signaller went for dinner, or to the races. (I'm not even kidding.)
I'm no railway expert, but I feel like most if not all of these could have been prevented by interlocking systems, which make it physically impossible to set points and signals in a conflicting manner. The first patent for interlocking had been filed in 1856, before the D+T even began construction, but well into the 1860s neither the D+T nor South Devon Railway had installed any. Instead, inquest after inquest just fined, demoted or fired the errant signaller for their mistake, only for a similar mistake to happen the next week, month or year. It was not until 1889 that the government made interlocking systems mandatory. There's a lesson there; I'll let you draw it for yourselves.
I will, however, take time to detail one accident in particular, because it's pure Hollywood. In August 1875 a goods train was heading down from Torre to Torquay when it was erroneously directed onto the 'up' line. The crew noticed the signal was at danger, but as that stretch is downhill, the driver claimed he was unable to stop his train despite all his best efforts, leaving his train on a head-on collision course with a passenger train parked at the platform in Torquay.
The fireman of the passenger train, spotting the goods train racing toward him, stoked the fires to the max, put the engine into reverse and fully opened the regulator. On the bright side, this meant the impact between the two trains was pretty light, but unfortunately, both the fireman and the driver of the passenger train had by this point jumped off their locomotive, meaning the train continued accelerating backwards, in the steam train equivalent of full-throttle, with nobody at the controls.
Two railway workers were on board the train, however: I'm not entirely clear on their jobs, but I think they may have been labourers working on the embankments, viaducts and such like. At any rate, they weren't professional drivers, but they bravely made their way from the carriage they were in, along the footboards, one to the locomotive to shut it down, the other to the brake car at the rear to apply the brakes from there.
The runaway train was eventually halted near Churston, after running out of control full of passengers for several miles. The driver was apparently never seen again; the fireman was demoted; the two heroic labourers were given £25 and an engraved silver watch apiece. The company then quote-unquote 'promptly' spent 4 grand on interlocking.
In 1877 the line gained a new halt next to the level crossing at the Floating Bridge. The Royal Navy had stationed the HMS Britannia nearby since 1863 to serve as a training base for its officers, and in 1877 two young sons of the Prince of Wales were due to enrol there. Clearly, it would be impossible for them to travel another mile to Kingswear and endure a ferry trip of five, perhaps even ten minutes back up the river to their new home, so the railway provided this new halt for them to alight that much closer. Britannia Halt remained in use for some years, at first just for naval personnel, later for any first or second class passengers. Any plebs in 3rd class wishing to alight here had to pay a surcharge to upgrade to second from Churston.
In 1902, the then Prince of Wales, by this time King Edward VII, came to Dartmouth to lay the foundation stone of the new land-based naval college. Funnily enough, this was built on the ancestral estate of the Seale family who owned the Floating Bridge and built the turnpike road leading to it, two of whom were original directors of the D+T. The King wanted to travel non-stop from London, and GWR duly obliged, which was the longest non-stop journey they had ever attempted, taking 4 hours 23 minutes from Paddington to Kingswear.
Clearly GWR got the hang of these non-stop services, because in 1922 the local paper reported the misfortune of a Brixham lad who took the train from Churston to Torquay to meet some friends. Thinking Torre station would actually be a bit more convenient, he didn't get off at Torquay, only to discover the train was running non-stop from there to London. Whoops.
Not all D+T related anecdotes over the years were quite so amusing. In 1892, the line was to be switched from broad gauge to standard gauge over a single weekend, and rather tragically, one man responsible for 2 and a half miles of this work felt so under pressure by the scale and responsibility of the job on his shoulders that the Monday before the big switchover was due to take place, he walked off these cliffs at Hollicombe.
On the 3rd February 1903 the same stretch of cliffs very nearly saw a far larger-scale loss of life, when a cliff collapse left the tracks hanging precariously in mid-air. The 10:05 from Kingswear had passed through without issue, but just a few minutes later a watchman stationed there saw the landslide unfold. He hurried to halt the trains in both directions, in the darkness almost falling into the hole himself, but thankfully avoided that fate and managed to stop the 10:30 from Newton from an otherwise surely disastrous fate.
The track was slewed slightly further inland, and incredibly, normal service resumed on the 5th. Tons of rubble were dumped at the base of the cliff to protect against erosion, and indeed, you can still see similar protective material there today. There are also similar heaps of blocks at Saltern Cove, presumably for the same reason.
This minor adjustment of the track's course was not the only such change to the railway's route and infrastructure over the years. The line was doubled-tracked as far as Torquay in the 1880s, and as far as Paignton by 1911. In the 1920s, the various timber viaducts over the creeks on the Dart were upgraded so that the GWR's biggest, heaviest trains could run all the way to Kingswear - previously trains like the famous 'Torbay Express' had had to change locomotive at Torquay or Paignton. At Noss Creek the need for viaducts was obviated by a small inland diversion over an embankment; at Hoodown the timber bridge was replaced by a concrete and steel one. As far as I know, the bridge you see in this shot is the same one built at that time.
Also in the 1920s, the rather bigger Hookhills and Broadsands viaducts were strengthened with concrete. The internet will cheerfully tell you that these viaducts were "built in 1860 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel", which is a remarkably impressive achievement for a man who died in 1859.
You may think I am being rather churlish, because of course nobody stating Brunel built them is meaning that he'd literally stood there and laid all the stones himself - of course it's entirely possible the labour was completed to his designs after his death, in which case he still deserves all the credit. The small problem with that logic is that he designed them as timber viaducts, and I don't think that's timber. I mean, admittedly I haven't quite finished my PhD in material science just yet, so I might be wrong, but it looks awfully like stone to me. Almost as if his deputy Robert Brereton redesigned them or something. If you saw my previous video about Brunel's Bristol, then I apologise for sounding like a broken record.
On the bright side, the scrap pipes from his failed atmospheric system on the South Devon Railway had proved rather useful for the chucking into the bog at Goodrington to help stabilise the embankment across what was then coastal marshes behind the beach.
In 1928 the GWR opened a new halt here at Goodrington Sands. Here you can see a steam train passing through, which is unfortunately all they ever do these days, as trains haven't stopped here for a while.
Likewise, the halt at Greenway no longer sees any stopping trains, which is rather baffling given that they only opened it in 2012. Still, at least the platform is still there, which is more than can be said for Preston Platform, a halt between Paignton and Torquay stations. This opened in 1911 in an attempt to compete with the Torbay tram network, but proved very short-lived, and is so overgrown now as to be barely visible.
Still, don't let this recounting of closed stations deceive you into thinking the railway lacked in traffic. Things had perhaps not progressed quite as quickly as the original D+T investors had hoped: in 1864 the directors expressed frustration than in the five years since opening, passenger numbers to Paignton had remained static; "little had been done to improve the town and it was hoped that 'local parties would take some steps to attract visitors'". But eventually, such steps were indeed taken - Paignton gained a pleasure pier in 1879, for example - and the forecast virtuous circle took hold. More visitors prompted more trains, delivering more visitors, prompting more hotels, prompting still more trains...
The inter-war years, in particular, saw GWR heavily promoting the English Riviera, both in terms of railway posters like these, and in terms of the services they ran. Locally, they diversified into running excursions, such as buses into Dartmoor, and pleasure cruises from Dartmouth up to Totnes - the latter option being maintained by the steam railway today. But perhaps most important was the sheer volume of trains they ran here.
A summer Sunday could see 50 excursion trains arriving from all over the country. London alone sent 7 trains a day to Torquay, but Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford and Carmarthen also had direct through trains to Torbay, sometimes more than one a day. 20,000 people might arrive at Torquay station on a single bank holiday. So great was the demand that plans were afoot to rebuild Paignton station with five platforms - sadly, World War 2 put a stop to those grand ideas.
The line also saw decent income from freight. In particular, Kingswear developed as a fairly major wharf for coal, coming in by ship from South Wales or Yorkshire. In 1895 the wharf became so oversubscribed that it was significantly extended through land reclamation - the railway were forced to build this bridge across the tracks to enable the general public to access the foreshore, fed up with them cutting through the station itself. Where today you see yachts being washed at the Darthaven Marina, you would once have seen a row of steam cranes lifting coal into railway wagons.
This being the era of steamships, much of the coal was bunkered at Kingswear itself to fuel maritime vessels - the railway still got paid for this, since it was coming ashore on their wharf - but lots of it was transported up the railway to the Torquay Gas Works. This was located above the Hollicombe cliffs (previously mentioned as the site of that almost catastrophic landslide), and had its own dedicated sidings. Today, much of the site is a public park, where the circular footprint of the gas holders can still be seen, as well as a second world war pillbox built to help the Home Guard protect this vital infrastructure.
After the war the railway found itself another significant source of traffic. While filming in Dartmouth I was approached by a gent who told me that he used to take the ferry and train to Churston Grammar School school every day; I later discovered that the school had been very deliberately built right next to Churston station in 1957 specifically so that most pupils could travel by rail. Laudable joined-up thinking in the planning of public transport and other amenities, in my opinion, but unfortunately, in the bigger picture, economic and social trends were by now working against the railway.
British Rail reckoned they held about 50% of West Country holiday traffic in the mid fifties, but by 1966 this had collapsed to about 10 or 12%. It was, of course, the explosion of private car ownership that had gobbled up this market share.
Freight was similarly being taken over by road transport. In 1965 all freight except coal was restricted to Newton Abbot, with Paignton and Torquay's goods facilities closing in 1967, and Kingswear's cranes being sold off in 1968.
As far as British Rail were concerned, the Kingswear branch south of Paignton was now simply unprofitable, and ripe for closure. My book suggests their figures were a little bit suspect, and had their accountants done their sums slightly differently, the line was actually at least breaking even, maybe even still slightly profitable, but there seems little point quibbling over that from this distance: their mind was made up.
Fortunately, the line managed to survive as a heritage railway, without even any cessation of service. Formally, British Rail closed it in late October 1972, and it was only sold to the Dart Valley Railway on the 30th December, but for the intervening two months Devon County Council helped with subsidy and British Rail ran a reduced service on behalf of the future owners to keep it ticking over.
The story of the Dart Valley Railway is almost designed to be as confusing as possible, in this context, so strap in: in 1872 the Buckfastleigh, Totnes and South Devon Railway opened a branch line off the South Devon Railway running from Totnes to Ashburton. Like the Dartmouth and Torbay, although built by an independent company this was operated by the South Devon Railway in practice, until it too was absorbed into the Great Western in 1897. It was closed by British Rail in 1962 and reopened as the heritage Dart Valley Railway in 1969. In 1972 it bought the unwanted stretch of the Dartmouth and Torbay, which it renamed the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway, subsequently renamed to the Dartmouth Steam Railway. In the late 80s Dart Valley Railway plc, the company who now owned both of these heritage operations, decided the original Dart Valley Railway was uneconomical, and transferred its operation, and later sold it entirely, to a charitable trust called the South Devon Railway.
The end result being that there was now a South Devon Railway in South Devon which the South Devon Railway didn't build and never owned, and meanwhile the company called Dart Valley Railway plc no longer owned or ran the railway along the Dart valley commonly known as the Dart Valley Railway, although it did still own a different railway in the Dart valley, and you can see why I warned you this was confusing, right?
Well nevermind, because for this video it's all actually a bit beside the point, which is that since 1972 the D+T line from Paignton to Kingswear has run as a heritage operation, while the D+T line from Torre to Paignton remains a part of the national rail network, today mostly operated by Great Western, although obviously not that Great Western, and ugh, this is gonna get confusing again.
Would it help if I pointed out that despite what I just told you, technically Paignton isn't the dividing point of ownership, because Network Rail still own the track south of Paignton towards Goodrington, although they only use it for empty stock movements, so we can pretend it's part of the Dartmouth Steam Railway even though it technically actually isn't if you want to be pedantic? Probably not.
The heritage operation also inherited the ferry service from Kingswear and to this day your ticket includes the trip across the river to Dartmouth. Echoing GWR's excursions back in the day, they also run cruises from Dartmouth up the river to Totnes, with the option of an open-top bus back to Paignton to close the loop, if you don't want to go back the way you came.
Although they'd paid British Rail £250,000 for the line, this included a lot of related land and property that was surplus to requirements, and selling this off meant the railway was almost free, if you can look at it that way. The Royal Dart Hotel alone got half their money back, going for £125,000 in 1979. The site of Goodrington's former goods station was another 15 acres of valuable real estate, subsequently turned into houses and flats on a street called Great Western Close.
As I mentioned at the start of the video, the Dartmouth Steam Railway is rather unusual amongst British heritage railways in that it's a profitable commercial operation rather than a charity reliant on volunteers. I had a kneejerk desire to write a snarky comment about how that proved British Rail wrong, but then I realised if British Rail had been allowed to charge nearly 25 quid for the short jaunt between Paignton and Kingswear it probably would've looked profitable to them as well.
Anyway, this is where I should wrap up with a satisfying and meaningful conclusion but to be honest I don't actually have one. Like I said at the start, all this history was more of an excuse for me to hike along the wonderful South West Coast Path and Dart Valley Trail, filming steam trains, wildflowers, wildlife and some stonking South Devon scenery.
I should note that I am not a dedicated hardcore railway buff, and the last time I made a railway history video it was a bit of a disaster and I made loads of mistakes, so please do head to the comments section to correct me, politely, if necessary, or go there to read the laundry list of corrections others have supplied. Bear in mind I did have to skip over quite a lot of detail just to fit within half an hour or so, which isn't exactly short even then.
Finally, a quick note to say that filming videos like this isn't free, so if anyone wants to help the channel to break even, don't let me stop you leaving a superthanks. The more these videos pay for themselves the more inclined I will be to spend money on travel, licensing imagery or whatever else to keep them coming.
Failing that, if you enjoyed this video I'm sure you can at least spare a plain old 'like', and don't forget to subscribe in case I make any more. Cheers.
