Re-tracing the Withered Arm 

Taking a two-hour bus ride for just £2.00 is the sort of travel bargain I am always keen to sample, so with the Government’s bus fare cap in England extended until 31 October 2023, this seemed like an ideal moment to take a summer trip to the South-West to sample both bus and rail services in Devon and Cornwall.

Following a route that re-traced much of the Southern Railway’s “Withered Arm” – the routes from Okehampton to Bude and to Wadebridge via Launceston – I was intrigued to see how busy would be the modern day bus replacements for these rail routes, which succumbed to the Beeching axe on 3 Ocbober 1966.

My plan for a lengthy day of travelling (23 August 2023) was to take a train to Exeter then continue on the Dartmoor Line to Okehampton (top photo), from where I would take one of the three “Rail Link” bus services to Bude. After a leisurely stop here I would travel south-west to Wadebridge, before taking a third bus journey to Bodmin Parkway and then train home and the treat of Pullman Dining from Plymouth to Reading.

In particular, as there have been calls to build on Dartmoor Line’s huge success since its reopening to daily services in November 2021 by restoriong rail services from Okehampton to Bude, it would be interesting to sample Rail Link bus 6, operated by Stagecoach and providing a five times daily link between Okehampton station and Bude.

My early morning journey from Paddington (07.03) to Exeter St. David’s (09.29) made a good ten-minute connection into the 09.39 departure for Okehampton. This train is scheduled to reach its destination at 10.16, making another smart connection into both the 10.25 Rail Link bus 6 to Bude as well as 306 to Launceston, which leaves at the same time.

Rail Link 6 takes just over an hour to reach its destination at Bude, 30 miles away, with stops along the way at Halwill Junction and Holsworthy, and the bus route along the A3079 running close to the former railway alignment for much of the way to Halwill Junction.

A modest total of 26 of us (and one dog) alighted from the 10.16 arrival at Okehampton, but the 09.25 from there had looked pretty full when we crossed at Crediton and there was a large crowd waiting on the wonderfully preserved station to board the 10.25 departure for Exeter.

There were eight of us aboard the 10.25 bus to Bude when it left the station, with a similar number joining at the town centre stop and many more along the way, so that well over 40 passengers alighted by the time we made our slightly delayed arrival at The Strand in Bude (photo above).

Travelling on the top deck of a 6 bus is a rather pleasant way to spend an hour (and £2.00), with a brief glimpse of Meldon Viaduct then some marvellous vistas of Dartmoor. The old railway track looks fairly intact all the way to the attractive town of Holsworthy, where two preserved viaducts are probably the most impressive survivals on this stretch of the Withered Arm.

As at Halwill Junction, so at Bude the former station, on which I was photographed standing with my sister by my late father a lifetime ago on 30 May 1962 (photo above), is now a housing estate, though in a nod to its heritage the cul de sac is called Bulleid Way and nearby is another called The Sidings.

Bude is a rather pleasant and bustling town that deserves a rail link, but is one of those coastal resorts like Minehead, Ilfracombe and Padstow that was robbed of its services in a mis-guided era of rail rationalisation and is now over-run by car-borne visitors desperately trying to find somewhere to park. 

From Bude, my circular tour of North Cornwall continues aboard a Go Cornwall 95 service, a lengthy route extending all the way down the Atlantic Coast from Bude to Newquay, with an end-to-end journey time of almost three hours. I will only be travelling two-thirds of the route, as far as Wadebridge, passing a couple of places that were once part of the Withered Arm at Camelford and St. Kew Highway.

The single decker 95 service at 13.10 from Bude had 10 of us aboard on departure, with many joiners and alighters during the two hours it took to get to Wadebridge, notably at Boscastle and Tintagel. This is a rather scenic route, with fine views of the Atlantic coastline and of Camelot Castle Hotel (photo below), as the bus threads its way down narrow lanes where passing other vehicles is a constant challenge for the driver.

Unlike the 6 from Okehampton, there is relatively little evidence of the Withered Arm on this leg of the trip – we do pass through a place called Camelford Station that is some distance from Camelford itself, and there are some signs of old railway in the hamlet of Trelill, where it passed through a short tunnel, and at nearby St Kew Highway, where a railway bridge remains crossing what looks like a now realigned stretch of the A39.

The former station at Wadebridge remains (photo above), and there has long been talk of extending the preserved rail route from Bodmin General to the town and on to its original terminus at Padstow, where the station building also survives. While the trackbed remains as the popular Tarka Trail, it is hard to see how any restored rail link could thread its way through Wadebridge, from where my bus tour concludes with a trip to Bodmin Parkway aboard the busy 11 service linking Plymouth and Padstow. 

It is two years now since GWR restored Pullman Dining on a couple of weekday Plymouth-Paddington and one Swansea-Paddington services, and returning from my trip to North Cornwall there seems no better way of finishing the day than with a free first class upgrade and a splendid three-course (£39.50) dinner aboard the 18.16 departure from Plymouth (1A96).

Just a week after sampling the menu on a lunch-time trip from Swansea, I once again settle for the ham hock terrine, sage stuffed chicken and British cheeseboard and once again feel that, along with my six fellow diners, I am playing my small part in helping to sustain one of the largely lost pleasures of rail travel – dining on the line. 

Travelling to Bude makes you reflect on the shortcomings of our railway network and those legislators who decide its shape. Re-opening the first half of this line from Exeter to Okehampton has been an outstanding success, yet Bude suffers huge congestion, is a major tourist destination and the population of Holsworthy continues to grow.

There are no remaining rail-served destinations along the Bristol Channel or Atlantic Coast between Weston-Super-Mare and Newquay, yet we persist in spending endless billions on a ludicrous vanity project called HS2 that now doesn’t even have a London terminus, when a few tens of millions would restore places like Bude and Holsworthy to our national railway map.