Whilst this enterprise involved little investment in the railway it involved considerable investment by the Coniston and Furness Railways in the form of two steam vessels to ply the length of Coniston Water. The first was the Steam Yacht Gondola, launched in 1859, joined by Lady of the Lake in 1908. Lady of the Lake was scrapped in 1950 but Gondola has made a remarkable revival. She was still plying the lake in 2016. One aim in building the line was to carry copper ore from the mines above Coniston; £20,000 of the £45,000 risk capital raised by the technically independent Coniston Railway came from the copper mine owners and lessees. In the event the mine had passed its zenith when the line opened. What few records survive show that the copper tonnage carried was much less than the slate tonnage and both were on an altogether smaller scale than iron ore traffic in the area outside the line. The line's 1877 working timetable shows just one daily goods train and no mineral trains, though goods traffic was supplemented before the First World War by the routine running of mixed trains. One goods train per day became three per week in LMS days, remaining so until the line closed to all traffic in 1962. The branch was lifted between April and November 1963, with most reusable materials being salvaged. Coniston station's footbridge was donated to the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway but the building was abandoned and left to decay until December 1968 when it was demolished by North Lonsdale Rural District Council's Roads Department. The site was later used for light industry and housing.