The impasse went to arbitration and the arbitrator ruled that under the terms of the lease, the railway was to be maintained as a broad gauge line. As the ultimate cessation of broad gauge operation was by now plain, this frustrated any practical progress on the reconstructions, and in fact no new viaduct reconstructions were started as long as the Cornwall company remained in existence. In the year ending June 1879, the gross receipts were £125,034 (equivalent to £ in ), compared with an average of £130,000 per annum in previous years. Accumulated losses since June, 1866 amounted to £149,384 (equivalent to £ in ); an average of £11,000 per year. A meeting in September 1879 optimistically concluded that it may be some years before there is a surplus for the paying out of dividends, but there was still an ultimate value in Cornwall shares. In fact the separate existence of the company was nearing its end, and in 1888 ordinary shareholders accepted a cash purchase of their shares, and the Cornwall Railway Company was dissolved on 1 July 1889, the line passing fully into Great Western Railway ownership. Now part of the Great Western Railway The train service during the Cornwall Railway years had been of five passenger trains each way daily, calling at all stations; there was an additional train each way in the summer months. As well as the stations themselves there were stops at ticket platforms at Truro and Falmouth, and the journey time was two hours 30 minutes Plymouth to Truro () and a further half-hour to Falmouth (). (The service from Penzance to London was by through carriage, shunted from one train on to another.) For the time being, the Great Western Railway made no effort to improve the train service, and other issues dominated. The decision had been taken to convert the gauge to standard, and preparations for this culminated in the prodigious task of the actual conversion of the Cornwall Railway route in common with the rest of the broad gauge parts of the route over a single weekend, opening as a standard gauge line with a full train service on the morning of Monday 23 May 1892. The line was single track throughout except for a little over a mile from near Millbay to Devonport, but in 1893 further sections of the line were progressively opened in double track, and by