Campaigners hoping to reopen a rural branch line where the Queen spent the night have been told they won't be getting any money in the first allocation of the Government’s £500m “Restoring Your Railway fund” . Five years ago the Royal train parked on the Newton Abbot to Heathfield line the night before the Queen toured Plymouth.
The line from Newton Abbot to Heathfield was opened in July 1866 as part of the broad gauge Moretonhampstead branch. Heathfield Station was first called Chudleigh Road as it stands right by the A38 around three miles from Chudleigh. It was renamed in 1882 once Chudleigh had its own station on the Teign Valley line. A second platform and crossover were added at Heathfield in 1927. A double track connection between the Moretonhampstead branch and the Teign Valley line was installed just north of the station in May 1943 to allow trains to bypass the coastal route via Dawlish should it become blocked by enemy action.
The Moretonhampstead branch line was closed to passengers on 28 February 1959 although a freight operation ran for another five years. The track north of Heathfield was lifted in the autumn of 1970 and part of the line was used to build the Bovey Tracey bypass. Oil trains started operating to a terminal opened in Heathfield in 1965 and China clay traffic was also seen on what was left of the line.
In December 2011 the line got a new lease of life when it was used to transport timber from a yard at Teignbridge (south of the level crossing) to North Wales. Due to the lack of a passing loop at Teignbridge, the train and its empty wagons continues up the line to Heathfield where the engine can run around the wagons using the loop in the disused station. The empty freight train then moved back to the timber sidings at Teignbridge to be loaded. This traffic ended in 2015 and the line was mothballed.
A few years later a group was set up to campaign for the return of passenger trains to serve a proposed park and ride site by the A38 and surrounding and expanding housing developments. The Newton Abbot to Heathfield Railway Revival Group tried to get Devon County Council interested in the proposal but in late 2017 Cllr Andrea Davis said: “A regular rail service between Heathfield and Newton Abbot or beyond would require very significant investment and on-going patronage/subsidy to achieve a frequency that has any kind of significant impact on traffic. “It is very difficult to see how a suitable business case could be made given the existing locations of the stations relative to population and traffic generators. There are other potential options such as a privately owned/leased or community run line which would have to be set up by a competent rail operating body. Now a bid for Government help to explore the feasibility of reopening s
