plan which would approve the closing of the lines. A majority for the closure was secured in parliament by Borgen's Labour Party with support from the Conservative Party and the Progress Party. The decision was made in parliament on 2 June, however some local parliamentarians from the Labour and Conservative Parties voted to keep the line Service on the line was last run on 31 December, and from 1 January 1989 the line was closed. The southernmost part of the line was planned used for the right-of-way for a new road. Nature and Youth had been working against the closing of the line during the 1970s, and in 1988 a local chapter was again established and started working to keep the line. They were met both with support and opposition locally. On 30 October 1989, 70 to 80 demonstrators from Nature and Youth, about half of which were locals, blocked the entrance to Tangeheia Tunnel in civil disobedience to hinder demolish of the track. The second day of the demonstration, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration reported the demonstrators to the police. Sheriff Gisle Johnson arrested five of the demonstrators, all male and from out-of-town, and four with long hair, and were fined NOK 10,000 each. During the evening, a mob of locals started attacking the remaining demonstrators with Molotov cocktails. This caused the demonstration to be moved to Sannidal. The demonstrators remained at Sannidal for a week, and had among other things meetings with Minister of Transport Lars Gunnar Lie. The group was successful at creating large media attention around the issue, with it becoming the group's most written about environmental demonstration in Norway during the late 1980s. On 3 November, NSB announced that they would cease demolishing the upper part of the line, although by then on the lower section demolition had already begun. In September 1992, NSB's director-general Kristian Rambjør stated that closing the line had been a mistake. In 1997, Osmund Ueland, director-general of the Norwegian National Rail Administration stated that he wanted to demolish the Kragerø Line and other closed branch lines. In 1997, the camping ground at Sannidal started renting out 15 draisines on the line, but the operations stopped in 2005. In the late 2000s, local forest owners started campaigning to remove the remaining tracks. In particular, they wanted to remove the underpass as Merkebekk in Drangedal, which has too low clearing for lumber