Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway

The Plymouth & Dartmoor Railway (P&DR) was a horse-drawn tramway conceived by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt to connect the Foggintor and King's Tor quarries to the port of Plymouth. It received Royal Assent in July 1819 and opened on 26 September 1823, running around 25 miles to a wharf at Crabtree, built to an unusual 4ft 6in gauge and worked by independent horse-drawn wagons paying a toll to the company. Granite was its main traffic, alongside lime, sea sand, coal, timber and peat.

The line's finances were shaky almost from the start. Its major quarry tenants, the firm of Johnson & Brice, lent the near-bankrupt company money to complete the route into Princetown, in exchange for free carriage of their own granite, an arrangement later blamed for undermining the railway's income. The upper section above Yelverton was taken over from 1883 by the steam-worked, standard-gauge Princetown Railway, built partly along the same trackbed. A stone bridge carrying the line near King's Tor still stands today.