The South Devon Atmosperic Railway.
In February 1848 Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental Atmospheric Railway running from Exeter to Newton Abbot was fully opened. The excitement at the marvelous new invention was curbed when the venture failed due to unexpected costs, coal consumption, technical failures and rats! On the rare occasions that it worked, the train ran incedibly smoothly at speeds up to 60mph, unheard of for the time. The railway had ceased to run in this form by 9th September of the same year. Seven engine houses were built between the two towns, the best preserved and known of the three still standing is the one at Starcross
Starcross Engine House, now the home of Starcross Fishing and Cruising Club.
A correspondent in an Exeter newspaper pithily suggested that ‘after the dissolution of the Company running the Atmospheric Railway that the useless engine houses of the now defunct railway might become lunatic asylums in the event of the shareholders in the company becoming too excited to remain at large’.
The irony of this suggestion was that ‘The Western Counties Idiot Asylum’ was founded in Starcross in 1864 in a house belonging to the Earl of Devon. In 1874 a large purpose built building was constructed to replace the original and re-named the Royal Western Counties Hospital. I (Gill Selley) have a personal link with Starcross in that my father was a nurse in the Hospital from 1939-43, and lived in the village with my mother, brother and me in Coronation Terrace. The Hospital was closed in 1986 and completely demolished four years later to be replaced by housing.