page_title: Cornish Main Line
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Cornish Main Line / History
caption_attribution_description: Construction of the Royal Albert bridge in 1858
context_page_description: The Cornish Main Line is a railway line in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. It runs from Penzance to Plymouth, crossing from Cornwall into Devon over the famous Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash.
  It directly serves Truro, St Austell, Bodmin, and Liskeard. It forms the backbone for rail services in Cornwall and there are branches off it which serve St Ives, Falmouth, Newquay, and Looe. The main line also carries direct trains to and from London, Birmingham, the north of England and Scotland.
  It is the southernmost railway line in the United Kingdom, and the westernmost in England.
context_section_description: The Cornish Main Line was originally built by two separate railway companies, the West Cornwall Railway between Truro and Penzance, opened in 1852, and the Cornwall Railway between Plymouth and a separate station in Truro, opened in 1859. The West Cornwall Railway was itself based on the Hayle Railway, opened in 1837 as a purely local mineral railway.
  Rail travel from Penzance to London was possible from 1860 when the West Cornwall company was given access to the Cornwall Railway’s Truro station, but the West Cornwall trains were standard gauge and the Cornwall Railway was broad gauge, so through passengers had to change trains there and goods had to be transhipped into wagons of the other gauge at Truro.
  The impecunious West Cornwall company sold its railway to the more powerful broad gauge Associated Companies, dominated by the Great Western Railway, and the new owners converted the West Cornwall line to broad gauge. Through goods trains started running in 1866 and passenger trains in 1867.
  The Associated Companies merged into the Great Western Railway, and in 1892 the Great Western converted all its broad gauge track to standard gauge, a process called the gauge conversion.
  Both the West Cornwall and the Cornwall railways had been built cheaply and had numerous timber trestle viaducts; these were cheap to build but very expensive to maintain, as the timber decayed, and the iconic viaducts were eventually all reconstructed in masonry or masonry and wrought iron, or in a few cases by-passed. Those on the Cornwall Railway section are described at Cornwall Railway viaducts.
  The most iconic structure on the route, however, is the Royal Albert Bridge spanning the River Tamar and opened in 1859; it remains in use to the present day.
  During the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the Great Western Railway was famous for providing transport to holiday destinations in Cornwall, and there were numerous branch lines served from the Cornish main line giving access to the resorts. The physical limitations of the steeply graded line imposed severe problems during the busiest times, not least for goods train operation. Equally famous was the line’s use for transporting vegetable produce from Cornwall, famously broccoli and cauliflower, and cut flowers from the Isles of Scilly.
  To cope with the increasing traffic the line was gradually doubled between 1893 and 1930.
  Many of the branch lines were closed during the second half of the twentieth century, but in Cornwall the Looe, Newquay, Falmouth and St Ives branches remain in operation, with a basic local passenger traffic in winter considerably boosted by holidaymakers in summer.
  The historical development of the line is more fully dealt with at Hayle Railway, West Cornwall Railway, and Cornwall Railway.
caption: The Royal Albert Bridge under construction in 1858
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