A COUPLE who celebrated the country’s branch railway lines by travelling along each and every one of the 2,563 routes have returned to South East Cornwall for a special anniversary.

The Looe Valley Line – then called the Liskeard and Looe Railway – opened at Moorswater on December 27 1860.

It connected with the Liskeard and Caradon Railway, superceding the Liskeard and Looe Union Canal, enabling loads of mined ores, and granite from the quarries on Bodmin Moor to be conveyed to the harbour at Looe for onward travel.

In 2019, the Devon and Cornwall Rail Partnership completed a heritage project all about the branch railway line.

The project includes a wealth of stories and facts to discover in the form of an app, a website, and photographs and documents displayed at Platform 3 in Liskeard.

As part of this initiative and to mark the Looe Valley Line’s 160th anniversary, documentary-makers Geoff Marshall and Vicki Pipe have made an engaging series of four short films.

Geoff and Vicki came to Cornwall in 2017 to begin their “All the Stations” mission – the couple visited every branch line station in Britain, charting their journeys as they went and telling the stories of the people and places along the routes.

Now Geoff and Vicki have focused in on the Liskeard to Looe line, making a snapshot of its history filled with intriguing facts.

To get the locomotive “Liskeard” ready for its maiden voyage, says Geoff, it was hauled to Moorswater by 28 horses, through the heavy snow that fell on Boxing Day 1860.

It was only in 1879 that a passenger service began on the line – but prior to that, the film reveals, one could be permitted to travel on the route when accompanying goods, and even a hat or an umbrella counted as an item that might need to be accompanied!

In 1901, after the completion of Joseph Thomas’ horseshoe curve linking Liskeard main station with Moorswater, the branch line as we know it was fully opened, and passenger numbers trebled overnight.

The route had been due for the axe under the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, but just weeks before its planned closure, there was a reprieve, and it remains one of the most scenic and popular of the branch line journeys today.

To watch the films and discover more about the Looe Valley Line visit www.greatscenicrailways.co.uk/looe-rail-heritage