Hello and alright me luvvers!
It’s July 2022 and I’m in Devon in the southwest of England,
mostly because my mum and dad live down this way
and I was spending some time with them.
But while I’m here I thought,
why not go and visit a slightly unusual railway station?
So today we are going to beautiful Dartmouth,
a town that doesn’t have a railway,
and has never had a railway,
but that didn’t stop them building a railway station.
You can buy train tickets from it,
and you can buy train tickets to it,
- which is what I’ve done -
but the only way of actually getting there by train is by boat.
So sit back, it’s going to be a beautiful little journey,
and hopefully by the end of the video
what I just said will make some sort of sense.
This is Paignton station on the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway
and it is a fantastic 1950s timewarp of a place.
But underneath all the glorious vintage fittings and retro design,
it is otherwise a normal railway station.
You can tell by the way it has a platform,
some railway tracks,
and perhaps the biggest giveaway,
there’s a great big train sitting here.
And of course we’re not here to see something like that.
So we’re going to hop on the train
and then travel the full length of the line down to Dartmouth,
where things get a little bit different.
Like most heritage lines in the UK,
the Paignton to Dartmouth line used to be part of the main national railway network,
but it was shut down as part of the mass closure of unprofitable lines in the 1960s and 70s,
before springing up again a few years later as a tourist attraction.
However, unlike most heritage lines in the UK,
this one is a fully commercial operation
that doesn’t rely on volunteers and donations.
Kind of suggests the government should never have shut it down in the first place...
but let's not get into all that again.
The route was first proposed back in the 1860s
by a company called The Dartmouth and Torbay Railway.
And as the name suggests,
it was intended to link the seaside resorts of the Torbay area
- which is where Paignton is -
to the historic naval town of Dartmouth.
However, the final part of the route into Dartmouth proved to be a little bit tricky.
First they were going to need to build a bridge over the river Dart,
which is nearly 200 metres wide at this point,
and then negotiate an area of marshland before arriving in Dartmouth itself.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried walking on marshland,
but imagine trying to send several hundred tonnes of snorting steam train over it.
Unless you support that weight with some serious engineering underneath,
your railway is going to end up in a very different place to where it was at the start.
And unfortunately the company just didn’t have the money
to do all the extra work that would be required.
But what do good engineers do when they’re faced with a seemingly impossible challenge?
That’s right - they give up and find an easier way of doing it.
So they dropped the idea completely,
and simply continued the railway down the side of the river that they were already on,
ending up in a tiny little place called Kingswear
on the opposite bank to where they really wanted to be.
As a result, the Dartmouth and Torbay Railway never actually made it to Dartmouth.
But they weren’t going to let a little thing like that get in the way
of calling themselves "The Dartmouth and Torbay Railway",
and they went ahead and built Dartmouth station anyway.
It was in almost every way a perfectly normal railway station:
it was built to a similar design to the other stations on the line;
it was painted the same colours;
and you could buy tickets from here to anywhere else on the railway network.
Really, the only detail that was missing was the trains.
But hey, said the Dartmouth and Torbay,
who needs trains when you’ve got boats?
And they chartered a couple of ferries
so that passengers could make the final part of the journey over from Kingswear
and continue to their destinations on foot or by carriage.
And on the day it all opened, on 16th August 1864,
I think I’m right in saying you could reach Dartmouth railway station
by pretty much any method of transport in existence at the time,
apart from trains.
And here we are, nearly 160 years later,
and Dartmouth railway station is still here.
The building that you see today isn’t quite that old
- it dates to a rebuild in 1890 -
but it’s remained much the same ever since then, at least on the outside.
And while the ferries have been replaced several times over by more modern versions,
they’ve been operating a service the whole time.
If anything they've been more successful than the railway itself;
the ferries were an immediate hit with locals
who would use them just to get across the river and back.
And that is still the same today.
In fact, thanks to all the extra traffic generated over the years,
the tiny village of Kingswear has now grown into a slightly less tiny village.
All because of a railway station that train passengers can only get to by boat.
If you’d like to visit beautiful Dartmouth and its slightly unusual railway station,
tickets from Paignton cost £20 return, or £13.50 for kids,
and Paignton station is on the national rail network
with connections the rest of the country.
For those of you in wheelchairs,
the trains and ferries all have designated areas,
but they recommend bringing someone with you to assist with the various ramps.
By the way - let me know in the comments if you know any other stations like this!
I think it’s unique in Britain, but there’s bound to be some in other countries.
And as always, thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.