Newton Abbot railway station serves the market town of Newton Abbot, in Devon, England. It is on the Exeter–Plymouth line, 214 miles 5 chains (345 km) from London Paddington, via Box. The station is managed by Great Western Railway, which also provides services along with CrossCountry. It is the junction for the line to Paignton but, for many years, it was also the junction for the branch line to Moretonhampstead and the site of a large locomotive workshop.
History
Broad gauge
The station was opened by the South Devon Railway Company on 30 December 1846, when its line was extended from Teignmouth. It was opened through to Totnes on 20 June 1847 and a branch to Torquay was added on 18 December 1848. The Moretonhampstead and South Devon Railway opened its branch line on 26 June 1866. All of these railways used 7 ft (2,134 mm) broad gauge. Approaching the station from the town along Queen Street, people first saw the large goods shed. On the opposite side of the line was the pumping house for the atmospheric railway system that powered the trains for a short while. The passenger station was situated to the south of these buildings. It originally consisted to two, later three, small train sheds covering separate platforms for trains running in each direction to Exeter St Davids, Plymouth Millbay and Torquay. It was rebuilt in 1861 as a single station, with a larger train shed covering all three platforms. On 1 February 1876, the South Devon Railway, which had already amalgamated with the Moretonhampstead company, was amalgamated into the Great Western Railway. The station was originally known as just Newton, but this was changed to Newton Abbot on 1 March 1877. The last broad gauge train ran on 20 May 1892, after which all the lines in the area were converted to 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge over the space of a weekend. The workshops at Newton Abbot played a part in converting broad gauge locomotives, carriages and wagons to standard gauge over the following months.
A new station Plans were put forward to rebuild the station with four platforms, but World War I delayed the plans. The goods facilities were moved onto the Moretonhampstead branch line on 12 June 1911 and some sidings were laid at Hackney on 17 December 1911, to replace those near the engine shed. These alterations paved the way for the expansion of the station following the war, with the rebuilt station being opened eventually by Lord Mildmay of Flete on 11 April 1927. The station, built to the designs of the Chief Architect of the Great Western Railway, Percy Emerson Culverhouse, now faced the town along Queen Street rather than the old wooden goods shed. Also in 1927, an old broad gauge 0-4-0 locomotive, Tiny, was put on display on a station platform to provide a link with the past. It remained in place until the 1980s when it was moved to the South Devon Railway at Buckfastleigh. The southbound platform had to be rebuilt again, following an air raid on 20 August 1940 during World War II. Six bombs were dropped (one failed to explode), killing 14 people. The Moretonhampstead line lost its passenger trains on 28 February 1959. Goods trains were cut back to Bovey from 6 April 1964 and were run no further than Heathfield from 6 July 1970 . The final regular traffic ran in 1996.
Recent history
The last trains used the former platform 4 on 24 April 1987; the removal of the platform allowed a level entrance to be opened from the road and an extended car park to be built. The loop lines, that allowed fast trains to pass the station without passing a platform, were also removed. Resignalling was completed over the following week and bank holiday weekend. Full operation was restored from 5 May 1987 and is now controlled from the panel signal box at Exeter. A new junction was installed for the Paignton branch and the signals now allow trains to run either way on each track. Some of the signalling equipment was taken to the Newton Abbot Town and GWR Museum, where it forms part of an interactive display that shows how the railway shaped the town. It was also at about this time that Tiny was removed from its position on the platform and moved to Buckfastleigh, where it is displayed in the museum of the South Devon Railway Trust. The remaining section of the Moretonhampstead line was taken out of use in 2009, when 'temporary stop blocks' were placed on the line 53 chains (1.1 km) from the junction at Newton Abbot. The line to Heathfield has since been reopened, seeing daily timber trains in 2012 to Chirk in Wales. South West Trains ran services until December 2009 between London Waterloo and Plymouth and Paignton, before withdrawing services west of Exeter to form an hourly service from Exeter St Davids to London Waterloo. After many years as an open station, new ticket barriers were installed in August 2017.
Accidents and incidents Newton Abbot has proved to be an accident-prone station. On 22 August 1851, the locomotive Brigand was derailed and Switchman Bidgood had to pay one pound towards its repairs. The investigation into a collision in August 1875 revealed that it was normal practice at Newton to ignore the signal that controlled movements from the siding to the main line; as a result, it was decided to interlock the signals and points here, one of the first such installations to be authorised on the South Devon Railway. On 21 October 1892, an engine shunting the siding at Aller Junction derailed and fell on its side. In more recent times, a collision occurred on 25 March 1994 when a Class 158 diesel multiple unit, working a Paignton to Cardiff Central service, ran into the back of a Class 43 standing in the platform with a Penzance to Edinburgh Waverley train; 31 people were injured. Then, in March 1997, a similar train from London Paddington was derailed by a bearing failure as it approached the station.
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