Okehampton restored
AS dawn broke over Dartmoor at 07.10 on November 20, 2021, Class 150/2 sprinters Nos. 150221 and 150233 burbled into Okehampton station to be met by the Hatherleigh Silver Band striking up with a brisk march. What had brought out the ‘great and the good’ to celebrate at this unearthly hour on a winter Saturday morning? Well, the apparently unremarkable arrival of the 06.32 from Exeter St David’s was actually momentous; the first passenger train since withdrawal of the service on June 3, 1972. Okehampton was once again firmly in place on the British passenger train network map after an absence of all-but half a century.
Casual observers of the Okehampton railway scene might have been surprised by this news. Surely trains had always been a regular sight? After the passenger service’s withdrawal, the line continued to be used by several eastbound loaded ballast trains a day from the huge scar on the landscape at Meldon Quarry, just below the 1000ft contour, two miles west of Okehampton station.
The rattle of the balancing empty westbound wagons had been a commonplace sound echoing across the valley, as was the spectacle of long excursion trains hauled by a wide variety of motive power, including (with examples) Classes 20 (Nos. 20169/20184), 25 (Nos. 25052/25223), 33 (Nos. 33106/109), 37 (Nos. 37059/37605) 50 (No. 50033) and 52 (Nos. D1009/15/23). Multiple units have been represented by Classes 117, 118, 142 and Hastings sets – but chiefly every summer Sunday between 1997 and 2019 in the shape of Dartmoor Sunday Rover trains. These were supported by Devon County Council (DCC) to encourage ‘green’ tourism to the Dartmoor National Park, a quarter of a century before ‘green’ political views became fashionable and subsequently mandatory.
The council-sponsored trains ceased in September 2019 and did not restart the following spring after The Dartmoor Railway Community Interest Company (a subsidiary of Chicago-based Iowa Pacific Holding’s ‘British American Railway Services’) became bankrupt and could no longer lease
