IF YOU were asked the question ‘What was the first steam-powered railway line to open in Cornwall?’, you’d be forgiven for thinking, if you did not know the answer, that it might have been the Great Western line which still exists today after being opened in 1859.  

However, it isn’t, for the first line, the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway, opened in 1834. While its original intention was for the transportation of minerals and sea sand from the port at Wadebridge to the area’s agricultural land. It also carried passengers, although, if the trains don’t stop at Camborne on a Wednesday, on this line they didn’t stop more than once a day for the first part of this line’s history.  

But what remains of the railway line today? You probably know a part of it best as the Camel Trail, the delightful, well surfaced walking and leisure trail connecting Bodmin with Wadebridge, Wenfordbridge and Padstow.  

As for the two railway stations along the route, you may have come across the Wadebridge station for it was retained and lovingly restored into what it is now. The John Betjeman Centre, opposite which, the name ‘Southern Way’ given to the housing estate which adjoins it a clue to the life the area once lived.  

At the other end, at what was once Bodmin North, it’s a car park, surrounded by a road with more potholes and craters than the surface of an alien planet, a health centre and a few businesses with very little clue of the history which was once started in the exact location.  

Until the Cornwall Railway, backed by GWR, joined in the desire to connect Cornwall with the rest of the UK in 1859, for much of the first 25 years, the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway was an oddity, in more ways than one.  

Formally opened on September 30, 1834, construction standards on Cornwall’s first ever railway line were slightly primitive, perhaps an indication of the relative youth of the railway revolution it was becoming part of. Unlike railways as we know them today, the original permanent way of the railway line consisted of 15-foot lightly laid parallel rails comprising 42lb per yard on stone blocks sized 20 inch square.  

To say that the line was designed and operated with the passengers best interests and health and safety at heart would be an ever-so-slight mistruth. While it wouldn’t be until 1906 that the intermediate stations at Dunmere Halt, Nanstallon Halt and Grogley Halt would be installed, prior to that, if you wanted to catch the train, you’d just stand to the side of the line and indicate you wanted to board the single passenger coach of the early days. Officially though, the train ran directly from Bodmin to Wadebridge only. 

Reliability on the railway line was also poor; the early, primitively designed locomotives, named ‘Camel’ and ‘Elephant’, the latter which was obtained in 1836, meant that the service was irregular with a timetable from 1841 suggested that the passenger service consisted of a train from Wadebridge on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, returning to Bodmin on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  

It’s safe to say that passengers were a bit of an afterthought in the early days, with the money-spinning mineral trade of more interest to the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway and dotted between Bodmin and Wadebridge were a number of ‘wharves’ – a term borrowed from canal operations.  

These wharves were located at Ruthernbridge, which was located on its own branch line serving small mines for iron, lead and copper, the Denby siding, near what would later become Nanstallon Halt, and a number of wharves on the branch line to Wenfordbridge, which was freight only for its entire existence.  

A year after opening, the eyes of the railway speculators were already transfixed on this nascent, odd little railway linking two towns and nowhere else. In 1835, the first company to buy out the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway was a group called the Cornwall and Devon railway which had hoped to connect it to a planned railway line linking Falmouth with London via the Bodmin and Wadebridge line and the London and South Western Railway network. It bought the railway for a princely £35,000. However, the C&DC never managed to get approval for their planned railway line, so all they had to show for it was the Bodmin and Wadebridge as it was first constructed.  

By 1847, the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway was in a sorry state. It was making heavy losses, unreliable and prone to flooding. By this time, both the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) and its great rival, the Great Western Railway (GWR) were continuing their rapid march down the South West and towards Cornwall.  

The LSWR sensed an opportunity to both make inroads into Cornwall and block the GWR from accessing a part of Cornwall. It made the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway’s owners an offer they couldn’t refuse – to take the loss-making railway off their hands for the same price they paid for it.  

An agreement was made, and now the growing railway giant up country owned a little, isolated railway over a hundred miles away from the network they were building. Not only that, but the purchase of the Bodmin and Wadebridge wasn’t strictly legal for the Acts of Parliament governing the LSWR did not permit them to purchase other railway companies, a technicality that would not be fully addressed and solved until 1886.  

The LSWR’s acquisition of the line did bring resources and certainties to the line which had not been there previously, and while it continued to make losses financially, it had an important strategic role in the development of railways beyond keeping the GWR out. There had been plans to link Bodmin and Wadebridge with Launceston in 1864, but this was never constructed and later plans to build a narrow gauge railway linking the line with Okehampton via Wenfordbridge was rejected by Parliament.  

It wouldn’t be until 1882 that a realistic plan to connect the line with the LSWR network would come to fruition; with an Act of Parliament for a railway known as the ‘North Cornwall Railway’ proposing the construction of a line from Padstow, an important port, to Wadebridge and Halwill, where it would meet the LSWR network. By extension, this would mean that the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway would too be linked to the network, and the act authorising the construction of the North Cornwall Railway also permitted the making of seven deviations to eliminate the extremely sharp curves on the line.  

On November 1, 1886, all services on the line would be suspended to undertake dramatic improvements to the line which would stop short of full reconstruction of the line.  It would not reopen again until 1895.  

In part two we explore the years 1895 to 1967 – the rise and fall of the Bodmin and Wadebridge Railway. To share your memories email [email protected]