In 1972, the good folk of Okehampton turned out to wave farewell to the Devon moorland town’s regular passenger train service. This weekend, unswayed by the efforts of Storm Arwen, Yoshi and I took a trip from Exeter St Davids to Oakhampton because after nearly 50 years daily passenger services have resumed along The Dartmoor Line. It’s the first railway line to be reinstated under the Department for Transport’s ‘Restoring your Railway’ initiative which in my view is a great idea. I have a number of lines I would love to see reopened!

Okehampton station first opened in 1871 as part of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) and was constructed to rival the South Devon Railway route to Plymouth. Okehampton was an important junction with lines to Padstow and Bude as well as Plymouth. Boat trains carrying passengers from ocean liners and famous named trains such as the Atlantic Coast Express and the Devon Belle passed through the station. Following the Beeching Report of 1963, passenger services were withdrawn in 1972, the track surviving because of the connection to the British Rail ballast quarry at Meldon, situated 3 miles from Okehampton, which had an output of 300,000 tons per annum. The line to the quarry closed in 2011.

Services resumed on 20th November 2021 and in order to reinstate the line for passenger traffic, 11 miles of track was relayed, replacing 24,000 concrete sleepers and installing nearly 29,000 tonnes of ballast over a nine month period. The journey time Exeter St Davids to Okehampton is around 40 minutes and currently trains run every two hours, although this is due to increase to an hourly service in 2022 following additional infrastructure work to be carried out by Great Western Railway (GWR).

Okehampton is an historic town situated on the northern edge of the Dartmoor National Park and is also the start of The Granite way, an 11 mile multi-use trail connecting Okehampton with Lydford. There are proposals for the line to be reinstated between Okehampton and Bere Alston which would see a connection through to Plymouth and would restore the continuous circuit of railway linking the towns around Dartmoor and provide an alternative route to Cornwall in the event of engineering work or storms along the sea wall at Dawlish.

Yoshi was made a great fuss of by the friendly volunteers of the Dartmoor Railway Association who maintain and look after the station building. We look forward to visiting again when the new Bulleid Buffet is open in the main station buildings.

Recently I’ve been looking through and digitising old photographs, slides and negatives of my train spotting days dating back to the late 1970’s and also video footage from the late 80’s/ 90’s. Although they are universally terrible in framing and execution and with an inability to hold a camera straight and a penchant for over using the camcorder zoom function, nevertheless they evoked a sense of nostalgia. Modern computer photo editing and techniques might easily enable me to straighten an image or edit video footage to a more acceptable duration I pondered.

But what to do with all these pictures and hours of video? The answer brings me to this website; The Railway Dog. Why a dog? Well, because my constant companion these last couple of years has been my blue merle cockapoo; Yoshi and I couldn’t think of a better name for a web page. Yoshi has a tendency to bark at moving trains, so on more recent video, he is very much in evidence on the audio track!

To kick off, the images below are my first photographs of a train, in this instance The Railway Pictorial Publications Railtours (RPPR) Silver Jubilee Special Railtour which ran from London Paddington via Bristol Parkway, Westbury and Yeovil Pen Mill to Weymouth before returning to Paddington by means of a visit to Cranmore on the East Somerset Railway. The motive power was formed by a pair of immaculately turned out class 31 Brush Type 2 locomotives; 31414 and 31416 and my camera was a Kodak 110 loaded with a slide film courtesy of my brother. Dorchester being my home town, I saw the special working pass through Dorchester West on its outward journey. In those days I would not have been interested in capturing the train on the return leg, as I had already seen and ‘copped’ the locos.

As you can see, no thought was given to leaving the end of the platform and getting images from the trackside. A practice that quite rightly just wouldn’t happen today.

31416 was cut up in October 2001 at EMR Kingsbury, but 31414 survives

Below is a more recent outing – a brief visit to Westbury, Wiltshire on 21st October 2021. In reality it was a trip out to capture the debranded LNER HST power cars which top and tail Network Rail’s New Measurement Train (NMT), but due to flooding in the Exeter area the schedule was disrupted and the train had already headed off to Salisbury prior to our arriving at Westbury.

The following week, the NMT was scheduled to visit Dorchester and Weymouth, but was instead diverted to Salisbury via Eastleigh and Southampton following the derailment in Fisherton Tunnel. Finally, after a drive to Gillingham, North Dorset on 18th November 2021 we were greeted by 43290 and 43274 in charge of the 1Q23 0556 Reading to Salisbury working.

The New Measurement Train is a specialised train which assesses the condition of railway track so that engineers can determine where improvements or remedial work is required. The train has been specially converted from Inter-City 125 sets consisting of two Class 43 power cars and five or six Mark 3 carriages. It can check the conditions most main lines and some secondary routes operating on a four weekly cycle. In January 2020, Network Rail announced the awarding of an £8m, five-year contract to Loram UK for the maintenance of the NMT and will see the train being maintained in Loram UK’s Derby facility.