The Teign Valley Line
- The Teign Valley Line
- by Peter Kay
- The Devon branch line that was known latterly as the Teign Valley branch, had its origins, as did so many others, in the railway boom of the mid-nineteeth century, but the history of this line is fascinating for its chequered nature.
- Its first section from Heathfield (junction with the Moretonhampstead Branch) to the temporary terminus at Christow, eventually opened in 1882 to little public interest or traffic and it was not until 1903 that the line was extended through to Exeter. The railway's investors, however, were not immediately to be rewarded by the promised increase in traffic resulting from the completion of the through route. That had to wait until the coincidence of the opening of a number of roadstone quarries supplying the work undertaken to metal England's roads, caused a burgeoning of freight traffic that not even the most optimistic of the railway's promoters could have predicted.
- Paradoxically, though, the cause of the line's success from the late 1900s until the exhaustion of the quarries in the 1930s proved to be its final downfall, as motor bus services poached the railway's already meagre passenger business in the 1920s and 30s. The Teign Valley branch survived the war but the skeleton passenger service was withdrawn in 1958 and the line was closed altogether by 1968.
- Widely regarded to be the most beautiful of all the Devon branch lines, the Teign Valley line is done full and proper justice by this original and detailed history, fully backed up by a wealth of superb period pictures of the line and its environs.
- 208 pages, 1995, Case bound
- Wild Swan Publications
- ISBN 1874103283
- New — £27.95
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