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For folks wondering about the condition of Meldon Viaduct...this pic shows the load restriction on the viaduct in 1984 http://goo.gl/1oDiZB

The Establishment (if that was the right word for it) , paved the way for closure by ceasing investment, changing timetables and connections to be as uselessly inconvenient as possible, slowing down schedules etc. It was mendacity of a high order, made possible by the lack of a regulatory body...

Boring into a granite batholith would be very expensive and time consuming. That is part of the reason that the latter half of the LSWR route from Meldon down to Bere Alston has a lot of twists and turns in it...the hard strata made digging cuttings and tunnels very expensive, so they moved the...

The route from Crediton over and up to Okehampton and Meldon Quarry, which is a single line, used to be a well-maintained line. I traveled it in 1980 on a railtour, and at the time it had a 60 mph speed limit all the way up to Okehampton. For a long period of time in the 80's and 90's there were...

The entire verbiage of the report perpetuates the assumption that the sea fortifications would not be damaged by big storms. IOW, the report perpetuates cheerful-whistling optimism into the future, regarding the sea defenses as a maintenance-only effort. The cost of the repairs from the recent...

I do not have any specific deviations in mind, but my tentative conclusion is that the route cannot follow the old trackbed in any case. Some local council offices have been built on it in the Tavistock area, just to give one example. The intermediate stations between Meldon quarry and Bere...

I agree that this route cannot be usefully reinstated in less than 2 years. If the job is worth doing, it's worth doing properly. There is no use in threading a cheap and nasty single track line over the former trackbed in a hurry, since that will not be a durable substitute for the Devon...

The problems with Meldon Viaduct were the condition of the viaduct deck units. The viaduct was originally built for a single line and the deck was then extended when the line was doubled. The viaduct was single line working from 1966 until the line closed in January 1968. The headshunt for the...

The big problem in all of this may be the age of the whole Dawlish sea wall fortifications. They date from when the line was built, and they may be ineffective relative to modern fortifications. My fear is that the broken piece of sea wall will be kludged, and then when the next big storm comes...