Secondary Routes of The London and South Western Railway - West of Salisbury

West of Salisbury

The Exeter and Crediton Railway (opened on 12 May 1851), and the North Devon Railway (opened on 1 August 1854) were leased to the London and South Western Railway from 1862/1863 and then bought out in 1865. The Exeter and Crediton line was a link in what became the West of England Main Line, the LS&WR's main route from London to Plymouth. The rival Great Western Railway had already reached Exeter at St Davids station. The L&SWR was able to build its own station, called Queen Street station (now Exeter Central), but due to the geography of the area the LS&WR was forced to construct a link line to the GWR station, where its trains would run briefly on GWR metals until they could proceed on their own line to Okehampton which opened in 1871 and reached Plymouth in 1876. The two stations were connected by a short tunnel on a severe 1-in-37 (2.7%) descent from the L&SWR to the GWR lines, a problem amplified by the GWR insisting that all LSWR trains stopped at its own Exeter station. Hauling heavily-laden boat trains or holiday specials from rest up the gradient frequently required three powerful locomotives. An indication of the tortuous route the L&SWR had to take through Exeter is given by the fact that at Exeter St Davids London-bound trains from the two companies faced opposite directions at the platforms.

The L&SWR's lines reached their most westerly point at Padstow (some 260 mi or 418 km) from Waterloo) on the completion of the North Cornwall Railway in March 1899.

The company's routes west of Exeter were known to railwaymen as "The Withered Arm". The name arose because these lines were constructed to much lower engineering standards than the routes nearer London, with steeper gradients, fewer major bridges, tunnels or cuttings, a lower maximum axle loading and often long stretches of single track. The name also referred to how these lines appeared on a map of the L&SWR system—in comparison to the dense, largely straight-running mainlines of the London suburbs and Hampshire the sparse network in the west with the single main line splitting into a series of long, wandering, branches bore some resemblance to a withered limb and fingers.