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Caradon Hill Railways 

South Caradon Mine Branch 
The office and the Tolls
Caradon Railways
Summary of the lines
The LCR
History of the LCR
Ore Traffic from South Caradon
South Caradon Mine
The Dressing floor Tramway
South Caradon Dressing Floors
The LCR through West Caradon 
 
 
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Detail from Photograph from Neil Parkhouse collection as published  in Messenger. 
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The Office Today 
The remains of the office in 2001 as seen from the footpath. The foundations can be seen to the feft of a patch of undergrowth with a line of fence post runnung infront.  .None of these fence post existed in the Victorian photograph indicating that these originate from the period when the LCR remained open but the Mine was shut and the headhunt remained in use to allow trains to reverse onto the Tokenbury branch. 
Using the hut as a reference point it can quickly be seen  how much material has been removed from the valley floor since South Caradon's closure. The huge wall of rock had disappeared and undergrowth now grows over the ore floors
In the view above a small office is  prominent beside the railway track at the head of the ore yard. The hut is dwarfed by the reveted piles of waste rock behind it and a lone worker appears to be busy with a shovel just outside its door. It has been assumed that the building was an office associated with the ore transport and was possibly owned by the LCR rather than the mine.  
 

 

 
Tolls   
The tolls in 1877 paid by the mines to LCR varied from 5s to 5s 9d per ton  
(ref messenger pp 48) .  
For each wagon loaded the railway would collect about £1 10s and earn approximately 5s profit. South Cardon would therefore be paying tolls of just under  £30 per week and adding to the railways profits by approximately £5 weekly. 
Today these figures seem small but to place them in perspective the amount of profit made on each wagon was roughly the same as the weekly wages paid to some of the mine's surface worker at the time.