Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Cheltenham became noted for the supposedly health-giving waters available there, and this attracted wealthy visitors, including King George III, and encouraged residence by the well-to-do.

Many of these materials were brought in to Gloucester Docks and had to be conveyed from there to Cheltenham; the Forest of Dean was considered a particularly important source of coal and iron.

[1] There were competing ideas about how to close the intervening gap from Gloucester to Cheltenham, as the roads were extremely poor.

[1][2][3][4][5] Instead of the ceremony of cutting the first sod, much practised later, the construction was initiated by the laying of the first stone block, on 21 November 1809.

The line was a 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm) gauge plateway, with cast iron plates on stone blocks.

It appears that more passing places were added later, no doubt in response to higher traffic densities.

The branch was built to reach Charles Brandon Trye's quarries on the hill that were already active and to connect with the owner's own existing tramways.

[1] The company now concentrated on finishing the main line by connecting to the River Severn at Gloucester, at Naight Wharf.

The plates were very weak in bending, and incapable of supporting heavy loads, and the trials elsewhere usually resulted in broken tramplates, quite apart from the doubtful technical effectiveness of the primitive locomotives of the times.

They were also to work in concert to build their line between Gloucester and Cheltenham together, as their individually proposed alignments were almost identical.

[1][2] Still the B&GR wished to find a means of getting access to the canal at Gloucester, and after considering ideas such as a carrier wagon on the tramway (to carry main line wagons) it was decided to extend the tramway to the B&GR Gloucester station; this was ready on 23 August 1841.

This solution naturally required physical transshipment of goods at the Gloucester station and again at the canal wharf.

[2] In September 1843 the B&GR proposed laying standard gauge railway rails alongside and outside the plateway plates, enabling direct access to the docks for main line wagons over the tramroad route.

The South Wales Railway opened in July 1854 and the tramroad suffered a serious blow, as the Forest of Dean minerals could now come much more expeditiously by rail throughout.

Its main business was now the conveyance of Leckhampton stone to Cheltenham, its advantage being that it could unload at any point along its line as compared with the Midland Railway which was obliged to do so at a goods depot.

Street running in Gloucester and Cheltenham were no longer seen as acceptable and in any case the business of the tramroad was so low that its income barely covered costs.