SUMMER SATURDAYS TO THE COAST
Taunton to Newton Abbot – a long bottleneck
The former Great Western Railway main lines from London and Bristol converged at Cogload Junction, a few miles east of Taunton. That from Bristol fed in services from three other important routes: the ‘North & West’ via the Severn Tunnel, used by trains from North West England and South Wales, the Western’s own route from Birmingham via Honeybourne, and the London Midland ‘North East/South West’ route via Derby and Birmingham. This busy cross-country route brought many long-distances services from the North East, Yorkshire and East Midlands. Thus large numbers of holiday trains converged at Cogload for the next 57 miles to Aller Junction, just beyond Newton Abbot, where the busy Torbay branch diverged. Apart from an initial seven miles of four tracks through Taunton to Norton Fitzwarren, junction for the branches to Minehead and Barnstaple (both of which carried significant summer holiday traffic), essentially this was a double track railway. True, there were some running loops at stations where faster trains could overtake, but otherwise it was a 50-mile-long bottleneck.
Work had been carried out in the 1930s to improve capacity on this critical route section, reflecting increasing traffic and summer Saturday congestion. This had included a superb flying junction at Cogload, linked to the quadrupling and major station remodelling at Taunton to give four through platforms (the middle island platform was decommissioned in 1970 but subsequently brought back into use). More was needed and under consideration by the GWR, including a possible new inland route from Exeter to Newton Abbot, but the war put paid to such ideas. Another scheme which came to nought was a futuristic plan for a double deck station at Exeter to separate Great Western and Southern Railway tracks.
Complicating matters, right at the start of this exceptionally busy section of line, was the climb to Whiteball Summit on the Devon/ Somerset border some ten miles west of Taunton. With significant gradients in both directions, Whiteball was a potential obstacle to good train performance, particularly westbound where the gradient rose to 1 in 80. Although the former GW’s powerful four-cylinder ‘King’,and ‘Castle’ locomotives would generally maintain time, as could most of the two-cylinder ‘Halls’, ‘Granges’ and ‘Counties’, smaller and slower
