This stretch of line had the briefest of careers. This picture shows a cutting on the Forest of Dean Central Railway's New Fancy Extension, opened in 1869 and closed again in, er, 1873.
The Forest of Dean Central Railway (FoDCR) received Royal Assent in July 1856 and was intended to run from Foxes Bridge Colliery near Cinderford to a loading dock at Brimspill, near Blakeney. Shares were sold, capital raised and land leased (at £100 a year) and construction began: in fact, the promoters became a bit giddy with the excitement of it all and took a further proposal to Parliament in 1857 to obtain powers for an extension to the Great Western's line at Mitcheldean Road with a further extension to Ledbury, although as it happened no such powers were ever granted. This scheme would have been blessed with the title "Forest of Dean Central, Lydbrook & Hereford, Ross & Gloucester Junction Railway", which is slightly longer than the railway itself would have been.
Anyway, the company was struggling financially from the start, with contractors not being paid, the Crown threatening to resume possession of the land leased for non-payment of rent and the company moving its offices from London to Blakeney in order to save money. In 1865 an agreement was reached with the GWR for them to complete the line and lease it in return for 50% of the gross profits. After some more legal shenanigans, the line finally opened in May 1868, but only as far as Howbeach Colliery, some miles short of the proposed terminus; the branch to New Fancy Colliery opened in 1869 and in the event, this was as far as the line was ever to get.
The Severn & Wye, in the face of stiff opposition from the FoDCR, obtained Parliamentary powers for construction of its Mineral Loop in July 1869. This effectively killed off the FoDCR as the S&W's dock facilities at Lydney were far superior to those of the FoDCR, who had built the trackbed to the site of their dock at Brimspill but never managed to actually lay track on it, or indeed to build the dock. The mineral loop was completed in 1872 and, as predicted, took most of the FoDCR's traffic: the Central line was formally abandoned north of Howbeach in 1877, a year in which the company could not even afford to have its accounts printed. The line struggled on until 1921, when a strike saw the end of Howbeach Colliery, the only remaining source of traffic on the line. Following this, the line was cut back to the goods station at Blakeney, but even this short stub of a once-ambitious scheme lasted only until 1949. The track was finally lifted in 1962.
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