THE SMASHING BIRD I USED TO KNOW

GB
1969
1hr 35mins
Dir: Robert Hartford-Davis
Starring: Dennis Waterman and Maureen Lipman

A schoolgirl is sent to a remand home after stabbing her mother’s lover

This crime drama in the ‘sexploitation’ mould familiar at the time features a dramatic scene at its climax, which involves a white Triumph TR3 sports car careering off a viaduct. As the car approaches a bridge a lorry is coming the other way. The bridge is that which takes Deepcut Bridge Road over the railway line in Camberley, Surrey, and in swerving to miss the lorry the car crashes through the bridge parapet. In a bit of cinematic jiggery-pokery the bridge then becomes a viaduct as the car and its occupants plummet to their death. The actual viaduct used is not known, but there is a suggestion that it could be Bickleigh Viaduct on the former Plymouth-Tavistock Plym Valley Line which closed in 1962. Just before this scene, however, there is a shot of the lorry driving along a country road and in the background a Class 310 EMU passes by high on an embankment. The location is not known, but it is not in Surrey! The Class 310’s were delivered new to the West Coast main line in 1965 so it is almost certainly somewhere on that route.

A lorry passes along the road as a train passes along the embankment behind. The BR-built Class 310 EMU in BR blue will be working a service on the West Coast main line, as evidenced by the overhead structure. This is therefore probably somewhere in Hertfordshire or Northamptonshire.
I would not normally include bridges but this one is central to the plot. The sports car speeds towards the oncoming lorry as it approaches Deepcut Bridge Road which passes over the railway line in Camberley, Surrey.
But as the car crashes through the bridge parapet it plunges to destruction off a viaduct!? Bickleigh Viaduct in Devon??