 As well as carrying passengers, it was always intended as a freight line as well, and to this end it was built to standard gauge, with bull-head rails, rather than the tramway rails favoured by many British tramways.This allowed standard goods wagons to run along it, without the need to tranship goods into wagons suitable for operating on tramway rails.In order to reduce the costs of construction, it was built under the provisions of the Tramway Act, with the support of the Board of Trade, to demonstrate that such construction could bring railways to rural areas which could not otherwise benefit from the new mode of transport.