Around the UK, abandoned railway lines are being turned into world-class cycling and walking trails that are boosting local tourism and recreation

When the time came for my family’s first ever multi-day cycle tour, the Devon coast-to-coast ticked all the boxes. The 102-mile route, from Ilfracombe in the north to Plymouth in the south, is 70% traffic-free and passes through some beautiful landscapes.

We began in Barnstaple, rolling along the salt marshes of the river Torridge, up to Dartmoor and down thegorges of the Plym valley. The gradients are gentle as the route follows the path of a series of disused railway lines. I soon realised the easy riding belied the huge challenges of turning a series of abandoned railway lines into a world-class cycling and walking trail.

In the 1960s the Beeching cuts to branch lines reduced Britain’s rail network by a third and bequeathed the country a ready-made rural cycling and walking network. The hard work - building embankments, bridges, viaducts, cuttings and tunnels - had already been done. All that was needed was a layer of tarmac. But unlike in the United States, where Congress passed a law to allow “railbanking” of disused lines for future use, Britain’s old lines were sold off or given away.

“Selling off the land was incredibly shortsighted,” says Graham Cornish, who has led the work on Devon council’s rural cycling network for the past 20 years. “But back then transport policy was all about the car and nobody saw the potential for cycle routes.”

Devon began building rural cycleways as a way of bringing tourists to less visited parts of the county. But the task of reassembling even just a few miles of track is painfully slow and beset by legal, political and technical challenges. It begins with finding out who owns the land and whether they’re willing to sell or lease it to the council.

“I go for the easy targets first and leave the hardest until last,” says Cornish. “I’ve had landowners who’ve said ‘the only way you’ll build a cycle path here is over my dead body’. And I’ve thought, ‘Well, okay’. If you wait around they usually do die, though I’ve got a few that are still clinging on.”

Cornish keeps his land deals secret so other landowners don’t cotton on to the bigger plan and start holding out for higher prices. He describes a “pincer movement” of land acquisition which builds the case for tackling the trickiest section.

One example is the steep-sided Walkham valley near Grenofen. Here, the old railway once leapt the gorge on a huge 15-span, 40-metre high viaduct designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. After the railway closed the bridge was demolished and for years a long, steep detour put most people off riding the route. In 2012 the spectacular Gem bridge was built at a cost of £2.1m, part-funded with EU regional aid.

Funding is a perennial problem for rail-to-trail projects. Devon council’s highways officer, Ian James, explained that proper preparation is essential.

“You have to get as much as you can sorted out beforehand and then wait for a funding window to open. That means having a strategic plan, acquiring as much land as you can, securing the permissions in advance and even lining up the contractors who’ll build it. We’ve got very good at that here in Devon. If you’re coming at it from a standing start, you’ve got no chance.”

In many ways what Cornish and his colleagues have done is heroic. It’s rare to encounter such an can-do approach from a local authority, especially in relation to cycling, which so often sees projects dropped at the first sign of difficulty.

Where Devon has built it, people have come, in their droves. Each year an estimated million people use the Tarka trail, half a million use the Exe estuary trail. Increased visitor numbers have saved struggling pubs along the routes and inspired new businesses. Early successes like the Tarka trail have convinced council chiefs to back more projects and won over many landowners and local residents.

Yet even in Devon it seems as though new cycle routes are developed piecemeal and at a painfully slow pace. The Devon coast-to-coast route took three decades to build and even now there are a some significant gaps. With rail-to-trail projects up and down the country proving their worth for tourism and recreation, transport and health, there’s a strong case for a faster pace and a firmer strategic direction from central government.

Without any national policy on rails-to-trails, it’s left to volunteers to start campaigns to get their local authorities to take an interest in projects and they must then wait for funding from central government. It’s not a recipe for success. Among current rail-to-trail campaigns are a new link between Chepstow and Tintern in the Wye valley; the completion of the Strawberry line between Clevedon and Shepton Mallet and the Otter Trail in east Devon; new links between Swindon and Highworth in Wiltshire, between Usk and Pontypool in Monmouthshire and between Peterborough and Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and between Frome and Radstock in Somerset. There are many more across the UK.

Our four-day ride ended at the docks in Plymouth but we would have loved to have carried on, taking the ferry to Brittany and riding south on La Vélodyssée, a long-distance route that will, one day, extend from the Arctic Circle to Spain.

• Jack Thurston is the author of the bestselling Lost Lanes cycling guidebooks and is currently working on Lost Lanes West Country. Twitter: @jackthurston