The History of the South Devon Railway From Mainline to Heritage Steam
The seven miles of single track between Totnes Riverside and Buckfastleigh look on a summer afternoon like a Picture Post photograph come to life. Green and brass paintwork on the locomotive, polished compartment doors, a guard with a flag, the river Dart sliding past the windows. The line is now one of the most beautifully preserved branch railways in England. The story of how it got there runs from one of the most ambitious engineering experiments of the Victorian era to the last days of British Railways and the early years of the heritage movement.
Brunel and the atmospheric railway
The original line through Totnes was not the branch. It was a section of the South Devon Railway Company’s main line from Exeter to Plymouth, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and opened to Totnes on 20 July 1847. Brunel’s design was a 7 foot quarter inch broad gauge, wider than the standard British gauge, and the route ran from Newton Abbot through Totnes to Plymouth. The Totnes section opened first for passengers in July 1847 and for goods in December the same year.
Brunel’s most audacious idea on this line was the atmospheric system. Instead of locomotives, trains were moved by a piston running in a continuous iron pipe laid between the rails, with stationary engines creating a vacuum in the pipe ahead of the train. Atmospheric pressure behind the piston pushed the train forward, with no smoke, no boiler explosions and, in theory, far greater hill-climbing power than any steam locomotive of the day could deliver.
The system worked in trials but failed in service. The leather seal along the top of the pipe degraded in the salt sea air, the tallow used to keep it pliable was eaten by rats, and the stationary engines cost far more to run than locomotives. On 29 August 1848 the shareholders voted to abandon the system. The last atmospheric train ran into Exeter on 10 September 1848, fourteen months after the line had reached Totnes.
The branch to Ashburton
The Totnes to Ashburton branch was a later project. Local landowners and businessmen, hoping to bring rail access to the small market towns at the southern edge of Dartmoor, promoted a separate company called the Buckfastleigh, Totnes and South Devon Railway. The company was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1863. Permission to extend the proposed line as far as Ashburton was granted the following year. Construction began under Brunel’s broad gauge standard, and the branch opened from Totnes to Ashburton on 1 May 1872.
The line was nine miles long with intermediate stations at Staverton, Buckfastleigh and Ashburton. The route ran along the floor of the Dart valley, crossing the river twice and clinging to the lower slopes of the moor. It served the corn mills at Staverton, the wool mills and abbey at Buckfastleigh, and the agricultural market at Ashburton. In its first decades it carried passengers, fertiliser, cattle, and the wool sacks that supplied the Devonshire cloth trade.
From broad gauge to standard
The whole South Devon network was converted from Brunel’s broad gauge to the national 4 foot 8 and a half inch gauge over a single weekend in May 1892. Thousands of platelayers moved the rails inwards across the entire line. The branch was relaid as part of the same operation. By Monday morning the Buckfastleigh branch was operating on the new gauge with hired-in standard-gauge stock.
The country branch years
For most of the 20th century the Ashburton branch lived the quiet life of a rural English railway. Three or four trains a day in each direction. Auto-trains in the 1930s. Cattle traffic on market days. Schoolchildren commuting to Totnes Grammar. The line was absorbed into the Great Western Railway, then into British Railways at nationalisation in 1948.
The end came with Beeching. Passenger services were withdrawn from the branch in November 1958, several years before the famous report itself, as part of British Railways’ rolling programme of unprofitable line closures. Goods traffic continued for another four years before ending in September 1962. The line was lifted, the stations boarded up, and the route was on track to become another statistic.
The Dart Valley Light Railway
What saved it was the heritage railway movement, then in its early enthusiastic phase. A group of preservationists incorporated the Dart Valley Light Railway Company Limited and took ownership of the closed branch in October 1965. A Light Railway Order was granted in 1966 allowing them to reopen the line under simplified regulations.
The next obstacle was the road. The A38, then being upgraded to a dual carriageway, needed the railway alignment between Buckfastleigh and Ashburton. After negotiation, an agreement was reached in 1969 to operate between Totnes and Buckfastleigh, with the final two miles to Ashburton sacrificed to the new road. The line reopened to passengers in April 1969.
Becoming the South Devon Railway
The line was rebranded as the South Devon Railway in 1990 and a charitable trust took over operation. The trust has invested heavily in restoring the locomotives, rebuilding the stations and recovering details of the Great Western era, from cream-and-brown signage to period advertising on the platforms.
Today the railway operates from Totnes Riverside station, a half mile walk from Totnes town centre, to Buckfastleigh, with an intermediate halt at Staverton. The line carries some 90,000 passengers a year, mostly visitors, with a growing number of local residents using it during the steam galas and dining trains. It is also a working museum, with one of the largest collections of Great Western locomotives outside the National Railway Museum.
What the visitor on the riverside platform sees is a railway that has had at least four lives. A broad-gauge mainline experiment. A rural branch. A casualty of post-war economics. A heritage operation. Each of those lives has left its mark on the buildings, the rolling stock and the route itself. Seven miles of Devon track, telling the story of 180 years of British railways.