A branch line was opened from Yatton to Clevedon in 1847. Clevedon, however, was quite different in character from Weston, lacking its sandy beaches, and developed as a smaller resort appealing mainly to older people. The two towns were linked by a light railway along the coast in 1897, which was extended in 1907 to Portishead. It proved very popular for summer excursionists and was kept open until 1940.

Another coastal branch line was the West Somerset Railway, built between 1859 and 1862, to connect the harbour at Watchet with Taunton. This did not prove to be commercially successful but it led to the extension of the line as the Minehead Railway, which after considerable financial and labour difficulties, was completed in 1874. With the arrival of the railway, Minehead began to develop as a seaside resort and its population increased from 1605 in 1871 to 8063 in 1971.

The Devon and Somerset Railway, which ran from Taunton to Barnstaple and was opened in 1873, was planned to link the North Devon coast more directly with the Midlands and the North. Its history is more closely concerned with Devon than with Somerset but it never proved successful.

Railway schemes followed the whole series of canal projects which were put forward to provide an alternative to the hazardous voyage between the Bristol and English Channels around Lands End. In 1854 the Somerset Central Railway opened a broad-gauge line from Highbridge Wharf to Glastonbury, along the line of the Glastonbury Canal. In 1858 an extension was provided to Burnham-on-Sea where a pier had been built to connect with steamers from South Wales. The next objective was to effect a junction with the Dorset Central which had opened from Wimborne on the LSWR to Blandford in 1860 and to Cole, near Bruton, in 1862. The Somerset Central completed a line from Glastonbury to Cole at the same time, and the two amalgamated as the Somerset and Dorset. The sixteen miles between Blandford and Templecombe, opened in 1863, completed the coast-to-coast route from Burnham to Wimborne and thence to Poole. Unfortunately it was too complex and involved a route never to prove successful, though a line from Mangotsfield, near Bristol, to Bath and then to Evercreech, on the Glastonbury to Templecombe section, brought a Midland Railway connection. In spite of the difficult gradients and tunnels used to cross the Mendips, high hopes of success were raised when this line opened in 1874, with the prospect of securing traffic from the new north­south axial link. After the opening of the Severn Tunnel in 1886, all prospects of the coastal traffic through Burnham vanished. By this time the S & D had been taken over by the Midland and the LSWR, and by connecting with Bournemouth provided an important through route from Manchester, Bradford and Nottingham. The line was also of some commercial benefit to Somerset through its links with the Radstock coalfield and with Shepton Mallet, where an important brewing industry developed after 1860.