Now Part of The Great Western Railway
The train service during the Cornwall Railway years had been of five passsenger trains each way daily, calling at all stations; there was an additional train each way in the summer months. As well as the stations themselves there were stops at ticket platforms at Truro and Falmouth, and the journey time was two hours 30 minutes Plymouth to Truro (53 miles) and a further half hour to Falmouth (13 miles). (The service from Penzance to London was by through carriage, shunted from one train on to another.) For the time being, the Great Western Railway made no effort to improve the train service, and other issues dominated.
The decision had been taken to convert the gauge to standard, and preparations for this culminated in the prodigious task of the actual conversion of the Cornwall Railway route in common with the rest of the broad gauge parts of the route over a single weekend, opening as a standard gauge line with a full train service on the morning of Monday 23rd May 1892.
The line was single track throughout except for a little over a mile from near Millbay to Devonport, but in 1893 further sections of the line were progressively opened in double track, and by early 1904 only the Royal Albert Bridge and a section of about five miles from there to St Germans remained single. Similar work was being undertaken on the line of the former West Cornwall Railway, the route from Plymouth to Penzance now being treated as a unit.
The Saltash to St Germans section was by-passed by a deviation somewhat inland, and this deviation was opened for goods trains on 23rd March 1908 and for passenger trains on 19th May; the former route section was then closed and abandoned. This left only the Royal Albert Bridge as the only single line section on the main line to Truro (Penwithers Junction). The Falmouth branch was never doubled.
Following the amalgamation, plans were put in place for the gauge conversion, which took place over the weekend of 21 May 1892.
The replacement of the timber viaducts, started by the Cornwall Railway itself and then suspended, was resumed and between 1896 and 1904 all the remaining timber viaducts on the Plymouth to Truro line were replaced by masonry or masonry, and iron structures. However the structures on the lightly trafficked Falmouth branch continued for some years, finally being replaced by 1927.
Read more about this topic: Cornwall Railway
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