The line’s reduced status was soon emphasised by the most famous feature of its workings, the ‘Dandy’ service. This was a passenger coach hauled along the track between Drumburgh and Port Carlisle by a horse, a system that stayed in use for well over fifty years. It was introduced in 1857, although steam engines continued to handle the branch’s goods traffic up to 1898. By then the track was in such poor condition that only special freight could be handled, again by horse traction. Four vehicles were used at various times on the passenger service, the most famous being ‘Dandy No I’, still in use in 1914 though built in 1861 and now at the National Railway Museum, York. Eventually the NBR, which finally absorbed the branch along with the Silloth line in 1880, decided to replace this anachronism. The first attempt to reintroduce steam traction in 1908 failed due to the poor standard of the track, but heavier rails were laid and six years later England’s last horse-hauled passenger service was at last replaced.

The final running of the ‘Dandy’ was on Saturday 4th April 1914, and two days later NBR class R 0-6-0T no 22 hauled the ‘first’ steam train of the new era. Crowds of people attended both events, and so many wanted to travel on the two-coach steam train that extra trips had to be made. During the First World War the service was suspended between January 1917 and February 1919. When it resumed passengers had been lost to the local buses, and despite attempts to attract trippers from Carlisle, the trains were soon cut back to only two weekday return trips from Drumburgh. The LNER made a last try at boosting traffic with Sentinel railcars from Carlisle in 1928, and one of these, Flower of Yarrow, was the last passenger working to Port Carlisle on 31st May 1932. Goods services finished on the same day, and the line beyond Drumburgh was abandoned, although the original line from there to Carlisle stayed in use for the Silloth trains for another 32 years. Little can be seen of the line in Carlisle, but its route through Kirkandrews and Burgh is marked by numerous cuttings, many denoting the line of the canal while from Dykesfield to Drumburgh the 2.5 mile embankment that carried both canal and railway can be walked. Kirkandrews and Burgh station buildings survive, though much altered, but nothing remains at the sites of Drumburgh and Glasson stations. Only a platform is left at Port Carlisle, and the lock entrance is all that remains of the harbour.