Lynton & LynmouthCliff Railway

An Act of Parliament in 1888 gave the company perpetual rights to sixty thousand gallons a day from the West Lyn river, and the railway has run on nothing but that water since Easter Monday 1890: two counterbalanced cars, seven-hundred-gallon tanks filled at the top and emptied at the bottom, one of only three fully water-powered funiculars left in the world. It was engineered by George Croydon Marks and financed largely by the publisher George Newnes, and it is still operated by the same statutory company under its own board — no council, no group, no grid. There is no timetable; the cars simply run, from ten in the morning to the seasonal close. £3.90 up the cliff, dogs a pound, bicycles carried.