Beneath the printed illustration shown here is a description of how the railway operated.
It states that: ‘The railway cars were started from a station a short distance from the pyramid or from the centre and then lifted with the passengers to the top platform by means of an elevator, run out on a small turntable, whence they descend the conical track to the bottom of the gradient, thence through an artificial tunnel of increased gradient, the car gradually rising to its starting point and halting itself.’
The railway system was offered by the Pyramidical Syndicate Limited. They were based at 26 Cecil Street and 85 The Strand in London, and were certainly in existence in the mid-1890s.
A letter in the bundle confirms that a William Henry Serjeant was involved in the syndicate.
A licence appears to have been issued to a Henry Matthews esquire of Plymouth for the Devon and Cornwall Pyramidical Railway Company Limited. The licence was to operate the invention, excepting Ilfracombe, for fourteen years from 1894. A Mr Pitt was involved in the financial backing.
There is very little information available about this railway system locally or nationally, although there was a Pyramidical Railway Company Limited that went into liquidation sometime before 1916.
Some further digging into the newspapers and many railway publications may shed some light.
Debbie Watson is an archivist for Plymouth Museums Galleries Archives.