page_title: Liskeard and Looe Railway
section_title: Extension to Liskeard
hierarchical_section_title: Liskeard and Looe Railway / Extension to Liskeard
caption_attribution_description: English: The Looe branch station at Liskeard in Cornwall, looking south; the line to Looe runs to the bottom right of the shot
context_page_description: The Liskeard and Looe Railway was a railway originally built between Moorswater, in the valley west of Liskeard, and Looe, in Cornwall, England, UK, and later extended to Liskeard station on the Cornish Main Line railway. The first section was opened in 1860 and was owned by the Liskeard and Looe Union Canal Company, whose canal had earlier been built to convey sea sand and lime up the valley of the East Looe River, for the purpose of improving agricultural land.
  When copper and tin ores were discovered on Caradon Hill, they were brought down to Looe Harbour over the canal; the volume of traffic became too much for the canal, and the railway was built. It was short of money and operated with a single hired locomotive at first, carrying minerals from Caradon to the sea at Looe, as well as coal and machinery, and some agricultural materials up the valley.
  Passenger traffic was started in 1879, and at the same time mineral extraction was already declining.
context_section_description: For many years, in fact from 1846, there had been proposals to link Moorswater with the Cornwall Railway at the high level in Liskeard, including a 1 in 7 rack railway.
  As passengers and non-mineral goods traffic became dominant, the disadvantages of the disconnected route and the inconveniently located Moorswater station motivated the company to act on making a connection to the main line at Liskeard. This became the Liskeard and Looe Extension Railway, which obtained the Royal Assent on 6 July 1895. The name of the company operating the Looe railway line had remained The Liskeard and Looe Union Canal Company and by the same Act it was finally changed to The Liskeard and Looe Railway.
  The line required £30,000 of share capital and progress stalled due to a lack of willing investors. The Great Western Railway were approached, but were discouraging, and an impasse had been reached, until Captain J E P Spicer, of Spye Park, personally invested the bulk of the capital. Construction started on 28 June 1898.
  The vertical interval—205 feet—and the topography in general made the connection awkward, and a tortuous route was built, running in nearly a full circle. The Lodge Hill cutting through rock was one of the deepest in the county. The ruling gradient was 1 in 40 and the sharpest curve 8 chains (160m). Because of the steep gradient, locomotives worked chimney first to Liskeard, to ensure that the firebox crown remained covered with water. The line terminated in a south facing bay platform at Liskeard. The connection between the branch line there and the main line was a sharply curved siding.
  The new line opened on 9 May 1901. A new station at Coombe, near the point of junction with the Looe line, was opened on 15 May 1901 and the line north of that station to Moorswater was closed to passenger traffic on that day.
  The new connection had a most encouraging immediate effect on business, both passenger and goods, and by the end of the decade receipts had trebled compared with the year prior to opening of the connection.
caption: The  Looe branch station at Liskeard in Cornwall, looking south; the line to Looe runs to the bottom right of the shot
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