Princetown is a village of about 1,500 souls in the county of Devon. Set 1,400ft above sea level in the centre of the Dartmoor National Park, it was founded in 1785 by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt who was at the time Secretary to the Prince of Wales (Duke of Cornwall), after whom the village is named. It is the highest settlement on the moor and one of the highest in the United Kingdom. Princetown is the site of Dartmoor Prison which houses a further 650 people. The Princetown Railway was a 10¼-mile single track railway linking the village to Yelverton on the Plymouth to Tavistock line.
Background
The ever active, philanthropic and entrepreneurial Tyrwhitt, an extensive landowner in the counties of Devon and Cornwall, one time Member of Parliament for Okehampton and later for Plymouth, promoted a horse-drawn tramway in the early nineteenth century to serve the Dartmoor granite quarries at Foggintor, King’s Tor and Swelltor. This was to connect Princetown with Plymouth, a distance of 24 miles, using horse-drawn wagons to transport farm produce, peat and granite, although it seems that only the granite trade was ever profitable for the tramway.
Still intent on improving the agricultural and extractive industries of the area, and apparently while the tramway was still under construction, Tyrwhitt followed this up in 1818 by proposing the construction of a railway to link Princetown and Plymouth. In due course a Parliamentary Bill was submitted to form the Plymouth & Dartmoor Railway (P&DR), with William Stuart as its Engineer. Parliamentary assent was duly granted on 2nd July 1819 for a railway from a riverside wharf at Crabtree, a village on the estuary of the River Plym, to Princetown with authorised capital of £27,783.
Tyrwhitt ceremonially but prematurely laid the first rail on 12th August 1819. However, contracts had not yet been let for the construction and after some reappraisal of the detail of the plan, Stuart was instructed to re-survey the line.
It was not until 1823 that the railway actually opened. Built to a gauge of 4ft 6in, which thereafter became known as the ‘Dartmoor’ gauge, with short cast iron rails on stone blocks, it was, in effect, a toll route operated by independent carriers who used horse-drawn wagons and paid the company for its use. Although it did not carry passengers it was sufficiently successful to enable the opening of several short branches over the next few years.
By 1852 local businessmen and worthies were formulating proposals for a South Devon & Tavistock Railway (SD&TR) to connect Tavistock with the South Devon Railway (SDR) main line railway near Plymouth. Part of the scheme involved the potential to lay a branch line to Princetown and Dartmoor Prison. Presumably the Government did not warm to the idea – at least not enough to commit actual money to it – for the proposed branch was not proceeded with. The SD&TR line, which left the Exeter– Plymouth line of the SDR near Marsh Mills and ran northwards to Tavistock, opened on 22nd June 1859 passing through a tunnel under Roborough Down, near the settlement of Horrabridge.
In 1874 an independent company proposed a branch line from the Exeter– Tavistock line to Princetown, with a short extension from there to the prison. This scheme also failed to gain support.
The Princetown Railway
It was not until 6th March 1877, at the half-yearly meeting of the Great Western Railway, the new owners of the SDR, that the Princetown proposal was again brought up for discussion.
