Great Western Coffee Shop

A former rail transport trackbed:

(http://i598.photobucket.com/albums/tt68/bignosemac/Mobile%20Uploads/_20161110_181556_zpslxaqmsxy.jpg)

Where, and the name of the former rail operation?

I verry much doubt that's anywhere near Taunton .

Newquay, the line down to harbour.. maybe

Crikey, that was quick!

Now, name of the operation than ran on this line?

Trains..... :P

Actually I think it's called the old tramway, although trams never went there. The line went along the path shown then through where the bus station is now (Manor Road), then down through a tunnel to the harbour purely for freight purposes.

The former routing is clear on google earth, follow from the station, curves around this path to manor road. The routing becomes less clear at the end of Manor Rd near to Sainsburys.

It was called the 'Newquay Railway' and was built by Treffry as part of his planned cross-Cornwall rail network.

The top entrance to the tunnel downto the harbour is some where under Sainsburys car park.

That'll be why it disappears!

Yes. Part of Joseph Treffry's freight tramway network in this part of Cornwall. Built to move various materials - non-ferrous metals, china clay, granite - mined in the Luxulyan Valley and on Goss Moor, to harbours on both the Atlantic and English Channel coasts. These tramways were worked initially by horses and gravity inclines.

In the 1870s, when the tramways were taken over by Cornwall Mineral Railways, the permanent way was improved and locomotives were introduced across the network. Stationary steam engines were used on the inclines or they were bypassed by easier graded, but sinuous, new alignments. Passenger services began operating in 1876.

Cornwall Mineral Railways were taken over by the Great Western Railway in 1896. Much of the current passenger line from Par to Newquay is on alignments originally built by Joseph Treffry in the early/mid 19th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treffry_Tramways

Yes. These were industrial 'tramways' and had nothing to do with what we would today regard as passenger trams.

The tunnel was short - really just under Fore Street and down to the quay. The rest of the railway stuff (presumably a winding engine house and some freight handling - if only coal for the engine) was where Sainsbury's shop is.

All of which is to be seen on the 1906 OS 6" map, available from NLS. I can attach the relevant bit as a PDF (by permission of the National Library of Scotland, for non-commercial use); I've never tried that so I I'll just have to try it and see. Or else try this link - http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=17&lat=50.4155&lon=-5.0857&layers=171&b=1.

Thanks, stuving - that link works for me.  ;)

But why 'The National Library of Scotland', for a map of somewhere so clearly outside their area?  Even before any independence!?  :o

It seems to be that NLS has stolen a march on others in digitising old, out of copyright, UK maps. Others have done so, but not as comprehensively or as user friendly.

NLS has quickly established itself as the go to place online for historic UK mapping. It easily beats the limited free content from Ordnance Survey.

I think they've done what they've done because they can. That they are Scottish based is largely irrelevant.

That's pretty much my view. They seem to have a more open view of copyright in the digitised image itself than some other libraries, and were keen to put their Scottish maps collection on line. Having done that, and made a reasonably effective user interface, they just kept going through the rest of their UK map collection.

I have also found their WW1 trench maps very helpful, and note they have georeferenced some of them too.

I've no problem at all with them being the National Library of Scotland: it was the "All of which is to be seen on the 1906 OS 6" map, available from NLS" in stuving's post that spooked me!  :o ::) :-[

Or do you mean "available from NLS"? In the past that would, idiomatically, usually mean "for sale". Now, I'm not so sure - it's available to see, or available on line, which I guess is what counts today.

I shall set up a stall tomorrow at NLS and see if I can flog any of them.  All proceeds to charity.  ;D

Anyone else tried sliding the blue dot in the bottom left corner on the NLS map? Now that's clever...

That's why I linked to that georeferenced presentation, as it was appropriate to the topic. It's also an example of what I meant by "a reasonably effective user interface"; the site is a bit clunky, but the technical display of the maps is very competent.

What you lose with the georeferencing is a choice of all the dated maps and series for a place. Obviously the seamless georeferenced map layer needs a nearly complete set of maps of a similar age. Since navigating from a linked page is a bit limited, and in any case some sideways links are missing,  here's a tip - if in doubt, go to "Map home", then down through the menus. Then avoid the top two UK-wide series, which are only library indexes without linked images.

I see that they have recently added some more huge-scale (1:500) English town plans, all of them south-west of Cheltenham so some are quite small places. They date from around 1885, and cover 24 towns in all - including (yes!) Taunton, though not Melksham...

These NLS on-line maps may be very useful to us, but of course there are losers. I got a catalogue through the mail yesterday from Alan Godfrey Maps, from whom I've bought quite a few reproduced OS maps in the past. It's going to be hard to justify buying any more if they are on line, isn't it?