Qualla: Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway

Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Afterbrunel, CC BY-SA 3.0. For more than a century, passengers on the express trains roaring along the Exeter to Plymouth main line could glance out of their carriage windows at Laira and see, at a flat crossing right across their path, a horse pulling a wagon. The wagon ran on 4-foot-6-inch iron rails. The horse, accustomed to its strange place in the world, would wait patiently for the express to pass and then plod across the steel of the main line on wooden boards laid between the rails. The animal belonged to the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway, a horse-drawn tramway that had been there first, since 1823. The South Devon Railway, opened in 1848, had simply had to deal with it. For 137 years, the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway and its successor branches went on operating exactly as they had been designed to operate when George IV was on the throne.

Image: Afterbrunel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway: Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt's Dream

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Lew747, CC BY-SA 3.0. The railway was the brainchild of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, philanthropist and improver, who had founded the small settlement of Princetown on Dartmoor and built the prison there in 1809 to hold prisoners of war. When peace came in 1815 and the prison emptied, Tyrwhitt began searching...

Image: en:User:Lew747 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway: The Granite Monopoly

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographed by Adrian Pingstone (on a chilly Monday before the school holidays, hence so few people) and placed in the public domain., Public domain. By the time the line opened on 26 September 1823, the financing was a disaster and the traffic mix was nothing like what Tyrwhitt had imagined. One trader dominated everything. Johnson Brothers had acquired the right to extract granite from quarries on Dartmoor and needed to move...

Image: Photographed by Adrian Pingstone (on a chilly Monday before the school holidays, hence so few people) and placed in the public domain. | Public domain

Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway: The Stone That Built London

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Afterbrunel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Rachel Evans, walking past the Dartmoor quarries in 1846, watched three hundred men at work. "Some are boring holes in the flinty rock; others are filling the cavities with powder; some are chipping the rude blocks into shape; others are lifting their ponderous weight by cranes a...

Image: Afterbrunel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway: China Clay and the Lee Moor Tramway

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Afterbrunel, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Earl of Morley, whose land the line crossed, had interests of his own. He held kaolinite deposits at Lee Moor, the soft white china clay essential to porcelain manufacture, and in 1834 a branch was extended east from Marsh Mills to Plympton to bring the clay down. When the So...

Image: Afterbrunel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway: The Last Horses

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Afterbrunel, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the standard-gauge Princetown Railway opened in 1883, taking over the main line for proper steam locomotives, the original Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway should arguably have ended there. It did not. The Lee Moor Tramway and a small surviving section at the Plymouth end conti...

Image: Afterbrunel | CC BY-SA 3.0