guest house english riviera, hotel, accommodation, b&b, torquay, devon, hudson, harbour, non smoking, rooms, guest house english riviera, bed breakfast, eden project, wind surfing, diving, fishing, guest house english riviera

Railway closures

The first of the local routes to close to passengers was the lightly used Torrington to Halwill Junction section in 1965, although china clay traffic continued to operate from Meeth circuitously via Barnstaple to Exeter until 1982. The North Cornwall main line to Wadebridge, and the Bude line both closed in October 1966, leaving only the Dartmoor main line still operational.

The Southern route between Exeter and Plymouth had always proved useful as a diversionary route to the ex-GWR South Devon line, which often suffered breaching to the sea wall section between Dawlish Warren and Teignmouth.

With the retention of the quarry and thus ballast trains between Meldon and Exeter, a complete withdrawal of BR from the Okehampton area was no longer possible, but perhaps this still remained the ultimate objective. Otherwise, retention of the entire Dartmoor line would have seemed a sensible compromise given the reprieve for the quarry.

Whatever considerations may have been taken into account, the old Southern route was not reprieved, even as a diversionary route. Following the withdrawal of through passenger traffic in May 1968, the Dartmoor line was lifted completely over the 20 mile section between Meldon and Bere Alston. This left the rump Gunnislake to Plymouth service at the southern end, which escaped closure due to the poor road network in that area.

At the eastern side of the gap, the Okehampton - Exeter passenger service continued until June 1972, when this too was withdrawn, leaving the line dependent for its survival on the Meldon Quarry ballast traffic and some general freight still handled at Okehampton.

The line nominally retained passenger status, as Okehampton was used for occasionally for troop and excursion trains, although these and the general freight traffic later dwindled away, with final movements taking place in the 1980's

A Second Threat Sectorisation and Privatisation

By the late 1980s the existence of the line to Meldon was solely dependent on the quarry, which had continued as the main source of ballast for the Southern Region, as it had done for the Southern Railway.

Under the Sectorisation structure of BR prior to privatisation, under which lines were 'owned' by the commercial business sector, the Meldon line, which existed to supply engineers' materials, was something of an anachronism, as indeed was the quarry. After a reprieve of almost 30 years, both the quarry and the line were again threatened with change, but this time there was no political leverage available.

Following previous attempts to sell, in 1965, the quarry and the line were eventually sold to ECC Quarries in March 1994, thus becoming one of the first parts of BR to be privatised. Only weeks later the new structure of the rail industry came into being, with Railtrack taking over control of the remainder of the BR rail infrastructure.

The exact boundary of the section sold was 183m 79ch from Waterloo, immediately east of the foot crossing at Penstone and some 200 yards beyond the divergence with the Barnstaple line at the site of Coleford Junction.