Perranwell Station
“The railway came in 1863, and welsh navvies, so we are told, did most of the work. Nicholas Rowe, who worked at the Foundry in 1861, writes “there was terrible drinking and fighting, three or four fights of an evening. Perran was an awful place at that time.”
The Church holds a map prepared by the ‘Devon and Cornwall Railway’ dated 1841 which sets out in detail and also on the map the land to be purchased or leased for the new line. According to this plan the line was to be cut on the Pelean side of Pelean Cross in a cutting past Crowsmenggus farm and into the Hicks Mill valley via a cutting. When the line was made some twenty years later the builders tunnelled the hill and brought the track into the Trewedna valley, as we now see it. There might therefore have been a ‘Cusgarne’ station had those pioneers had their way.
The railway map of 1841 shows roads and fields near the proposed track and indicates much moor and wastrel.
In 1892 the broad gauge was replaced by the standard gauge track. My neighbour gave an account of the work done at Perran. It was a Sunday in 1892 and he remembers the crowds of workers lining the banks at Trewedna and Bargus engaged in the lightning transfer of the rails. He remembers how they ate gruel which was ladled into their dinner tins and how they refreshed themselves in no uncertain way at the Royal Oak.”