Ward then left Chaplin, and went over to the Exeter “Telegraph,” the fast day coach run by Mrs. Ann Nelson, in opposition to Chaplin’s “Quicksilver Mail.” Mrs. Nelson was glad to get so steady a whip as Ward, who for three years from this time drove the “Telegraph” daily between Exeter and Ilminster, a double journey of 66 miles. In 1841 the Bristol and Exeter Railway, a continuation of the Great Western, was opened as far as Bridgewater, and, by consequence, the “Telegraph” was withdrawn by Mrs. Nelson and her co-partners. Ward, however, held on, and, with the coachman on the other side of his stage and the two guards, extended the journey at one end as the railway cut it short at the other. From 1841 to April 30th, 1844, the “Telegraph” therefore ran the 95 miles between Bridgewater and Devonport, taking up the railway passengers at the former place. On May 1st, 1844, the railway was opened to Exeter, and the journey of the poor old “Telegraph” was cut down to 50 miles. But those were spirited times, and even then, driven thus into the West, there were competing coaches. A “Nonpareil” Bristol and Devonport coach had been running daily at the same hours as the “Telegraph,” but was taken off, and a “Tally-Ho” put on the shorter Exeter and Devonport trip. _Then_ the racing became furious. Up out of Exeter, on to the breezy heights of Haldon, and by the skirts of Dartmoor the two coaches sped--the “Telegraph,” as Ward tells us in his reminiscences, always leading. Several times they did the 50 miles in 3 hours 20 minutes, and for months together never exceeded 4 hours! That mad pace could not last; and so, as neither could run the other off the road, they agreed to keep it amicably for so long as the railway, pushing irresistibly onward, would suffer them to exist. On May 1st, 1848, the South Devon Railway was opened to Plymouth, and it seemed as though coaching in the West of England was quite killed; but a number of Cornish gentlemen approaching Ward with the proposal that he should start a fast coach into Cornwall, and promising to support it, he put a “Tally-Ho” on the road between Plymouth, Truro and Falmouth, a distance of 62 miles. He was so fortunate as to be offered the contract for carrying the mail between those places, and the “Tally-Ho” was converted into a mail, and ran for a number of years until the railway was opened to Truro, in May 1859. Then, and then only, did Ward’s career as a coachman end, for although for some years, being proprietor, he had seldom driven, he had not hitherto deserted the box-seat, despite the calls upon his time of the horse-mart and driving-school business he had meanwhile established at Plymouth.