PLYMOUTH |
The Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History |
|
|
A RAILWAY ACROSS THE CENTRE OF DARTMOOR Mr James Meadows Rendel was the son of a small farmer and a road surveyor near Okehampton, in mid Devon. He was apprenticed to Thomas Telford, the great canal and road engineer, and in the 1820s became the consulting engineer to Lord Morley of Saltram, just to the east of Plymouth. He was responsible for the design and construction of the LAIRA BRIDGE, linking Lord Morley's estate with Plymouth. He was also engineer to the Johnson Brothers who owned the PLYMOUTH & DARTMOOR RAILWAY and the granite quarries at King Tor, near Princetown. Before even the formation of the Great Western Railway, Rendle started to investigate linking Plymouth and Exeter by means of a railway across the centre of Dartmoor. He arranged for a Mr H Beardmore to carry out a detailed survey and plans were deposited with the Clerk of the Peace for the County of Devon on February 20th 1840. In the following August a report was published which gave details of his proposal and this was the subject of an important meeting held at Plymouth's Royal Hotel on October 28th 1840. Rendel had looked at three possible routes between the two towns. A line to the north of Dartmoor would have run 24 miles up the Tamar valley to Launceston and still have been 40 miles to the west of Exeter, whereas the 'as the crow flies' distance across the Moor was only 36 miles. The line would have involved heavy engineering. Isambard Kingdom Brunel surveyed a route to the south of Dartmoor in 1836, taking in Ivybridge, Totnes and Teignmouth, but this was 50 miles in length. It would involve several inclined planes and a number of tunnels and the cost was put at £1,800,000. Consequentially, Rendel's preferred solution was the route across the Moor, where the valleys would be easy to cross, at a total length of a fraction under 43 miles. An additional benefit was that it would also be possible to build a branch-line to Tavistock. The total cost would be only £770,781, a saving of over £1 million on the South Hams route. It was on May 1st 1844 that the Bristol and Exeter Railway reached its southern terminus. Following the decision to abandon James Meadows Rendel's proposal for a route from Exeter to Plymouth right across the centre of Dartmoor, the South Devon Railway was authorised by an Act of Parliament of July 4th that year to carry the line westwards to a terminus at the Eldad district of Plymouth. It was the brainchild of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer of both the Great Western and the Bristol and Exeter railways and was originally called the Plymouth, Devonport and Exeter Railway. It was funded by those two companies along with the Bristol & Gloucester Railway. The name of the company had been changed to the South Devon Railway at a shareholder's meeting on November 21st 1843, when the proposed route was finally accepted.
|
