Great British Railway Journeys Text Only - Michael Portillo

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events, so people understand what the issues and aims are. If you can create a groundswell of people fired up on the key issues, you’re much more likely to be successful as you move forward. The extraordinary thing is that what started in a small way in Totnes is now being used by thousands of towns, cities and villages around the world.

      From Totnes the line skirts the southern edge of Dartmoor and then, after crossing the Tamar at Saltash on Brunel’s enormous Royal Albert Bridge (his last great achievement, completed in 1859, the year he died), you are in Cornwall. We carried on west through St Germans, and shortly before St Austell we stopped at a small town called Par, which Bradshaw described as ‘a mining town in west Cornwall near the sea with several important mines round it in the granite producing copper, nickel, with clay, and china stone for the Staffordshire potteries’. In fact, Par was an important hub for the huge industry fed by the biggest china clay deposits in the world. For almost 100 years clay used in the Potteries for making porcelain was shipped northwards by sea and canal. In the 1840s the railways took over, and soon it was being ferried on a network of lines that criss-crossed the county.

      Most of those lines are long gone now, but one that does still run is used by the clay train that carries 1,140 tons of clay each day to the port of Fowey. Though it rarely takes passengers, we were lucky enough to hitch a ride along a single-track line through stunning Cornish countryside towards to the sea.

      Because it’s a single track, the trains have a very simple safety system that Bradshaw would have recognised. For the train to go down the track, it has to collect from the signal box a token in the form of a staff, like a heavy relay baton – and there’s only one token in circulation for the line, so once you have it you know there’s nothing about to come the other way.

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