Issue Cymru Preview
This is how the stories will look.
Wales, and the railways that started it all
A whole issue for Wales: the world's first heritage railway, a mountain line that never needed saving, and the creator putting Welsh steam on the map.
In this issue
A special edition for Wales. The Talyllyn at 75 and how it became the Skarloey Railway, the Snowdon Mountain Railway and its one terrible day, Dan of @cymrurails on building a following from Welsh steam, and a Welsh Through the Lens.
Welcome to Wales
Hello fellow wanderers, and welcome to a special edition of Whistle & Wander magazine.
In our heritage space there are fabulous stories aplenty, but something I have noticed during my time making rail content is that a lot goes on in the quaint railways of Wales, yet on the whole they seem under-represented when it comes to the heritage railways of Great Britain. It does make sense, though. Visiting all the heritage railways in Britain is a lifelong task, and when people come over from abroad they are usually drawn to the railways that shout the loudest and are the best known. The same goes for locomotives. Sir Nigel Gresley, The Duke of Gloucester and Flying Scotsman all pull massive crowds, while the smaller narrow-gauge lines of the Welsh countryside are more of a side note, or a passing comment.
So, to do something about that, I have decided to dedicate a whole edition to Wales. Now, if I had managed to write about everything going on in Wales this edition would have been a book, not a magazine. I have tried my best to fit in as much as I can with the resources and time I have, so if your favourite Welsh locomotive or railway isn't featured, don't despair. I am aiming to make Wales a regular part of the Whistle & Wander story going forward.
A big part of this is down to the relationships I am forging through this endeavour, which is achieving exactly what I set out to do: bringing the heritage space closer together. I had the chance to sit down with the Talyllyn and hear about their amazing story, which I won't spoil, but it has made me eager to go and visit them for the first time. I also reached out to Dan of @cymrurails, whose work I have admired for a long time, to hear how he went from your average rail enthusiast to the biggest rail creator in Wales. All stories that fit perfectly in the Whistle & Wander space.
My connection to Wales is more than just an appreciation of its numerous railways, though. I am in fact part Welsh. My grandmother was born in Aberystwyth and her grandfather was a steam raiser there. I was born early enough to know my great-grandmother well, and she had a thick Welsh accent and ran the family with an iron fist until her death. She was a lovely woman with a heart of gold, but none of us dared mess with her. My grandmother's aunt also had a wool shop on Portland Road in Aberystwyth, where she designed knitting patterns for Sirdar. She once knitted a jumper for Prince Charles, now King Charles III, while he was at Aberystwyth University, and he called into her shop to thank her personally. My great-grandmother married a man from Preston, had my grandmother in Aberystwyth, and then the whole lot of them moved north to Preston. So my bloodline started out Welsh and only became a Lancashire family later, which is probably why Wales has always felt like somewhere I am returning to rather than somewhere I am visiting.
And return I have, several times. I am yet to visit my ancestors' home town of Aberystwyth and the railway there, but I have been to the Ffestiniog, the Snowdon Mountain Railway and several other narrow-gauge lines in the area. When life allows I want to return and do more adventuring in the picturesque landscape that awaits travellers there. I have a deep love for the country and it never fails to impress me each time I visit.
As for how this venture is going overall, as I write this the social media platforms for W&W continue to grow, and we are on the cusp of ten thousand followers across platforms already, only five months on from the first announcement. I hope that momentum continues and this publication is able to bring you great railway stories long into the future. It has been an honour putting this together and being in a position where I can cover such a wonderful set of railways. I hope you enjoy this special edition of Whistle & Wander and, as always...
Keep on track.
Alex Fletcher · Editor and Founder
The Railway That Never Needed Saving
Snowdon Mountain Railway has been pushing Victorian steam up a Welsh mountain since 1896. It was never rescued, and that is exactly why it is worth the trip.
Climbing the flank of Snowdon. Photo: @fenling_photography
Snowdon Mountain Railway is not a heritage railway.
I appreciate how that reads in a heritage railway magazine, written by a man who has built an entire career on heritage railways, about a railway that has been running Victorian steam locomotives up a Welsh mountain since 1896. Bear with me.
There is no preservation society. There are no volunteers giving up their Saturdays to scrape rust off a boiler. Nobody dragged a locomotive out of Barry scrapyard and spent thirty years and half a million pounds putting it back together. There was no closure, no last train, no campaign, no appeal fund, no plucky group of enthusiasts refusing to let something die. None of the things we usually mean when we say heritage happened here.
What happened instead is that a Victorian tourist business opened in 1896 and then simply carried on being a Victorian tourist business for the next hundred and thirty years. Same mountain, same track, same trade, sold to essentially the same customer. It is owned by a leisure company. It always has been. It never needed saving because it never stopped.
And that, I think, is why enthusiasts can be so sniffy about it. It doesn't fit the story we like to tell ourselves about why these things matter. It was never rescued, so there is nothing to feel noble about. Meanwhile something like 140,000 people a year climb aboard, and a fair few of them get off at the bottom saying it was the best train ride in Britain.
Both of those things can be true. But only one of them requires you to actually go.
Spite, mostly
The idea of a railway up Snowdon is older than the railway itself. It first surfaced in 1869, when the London & North Western Railway linked Llanberis to Caernarfon and somebody looked up at the mountain and did the obvious sum. A Bill went before Parliament in 1871 seeking compulsory purchase powers to build to the summit.
It was killed by the local landowner, Assheton-Smith of the Vaynol Estate, whose objection was that a line to the top would ruin the look of the place.
Then, nothing. For twenty-two years the mountain stayed exactly as he wanted it and the idea went nowhere, because he owned the ground and he had made his position clear.
What changed his mind was not a sudden appreciation of Victorian engineering. In 1893 the North Wales Narrow Gauge Railways renamed its terminus at Rhyd Ddu. The new name was "Snowdon". It sat on the mountain's south-western flank, it was nowhere near the summit, and it worked exactly as intended: tourists who would have gone to Llanberis went to Rhyd Ddu instead. The guesthouses and hotels of Llanberis started haemorrhaging trade.
Those guesthouses and hotels were, almost to a building, tenanted by Assheton-Smith.
His agent, Captain N. P. Stewart, made the case for a line from Llanberis to the summit. Assheton-Smith withdrew his objections. In 1894 the Snowdon Mountain Tramroad and Hotels Company Ltd was formed, and the railway that would spoil the scenery became the railway that would protect the rent.
The railway that would spoil the scenery became the railway that would protect the rent.
Alex Fletcher
Here is the part that mattered more than anyone realised at the time. Because the company already owned every inch of ground the line would cross, it needed no Act of Parliament. No compulsory purchase, no Bill, no parliamentary scrutiny. That was highly unusual for a railway carrying fare-paying passengers, and it had one further consequence: the Snowdon Mountain Railway fell entirely outside the jurisdiction of the Board of Trade. Nobody was legally required to inspect it. Nobody was legally required to sign it off as safe.
Construction ran from December 1894, when Enid Assheton-Smith cut the first sod, through to February 1896. A workforce of roughly 150 got nearly eight kilometres of track onto the side of a mountain in fourteen months, using hand tools and explosives and not much else, for a total cost of £63,800. The engineers were Sir Douglas Fox and Andrew Fox of London; the contractors, Holme and King of Liverpool.
The track could only be laid from one end, working upwards, because the rack rail down the centre had to line up perfectly section to section. So although the first locomotives arrived in July 1895, almost nothing was laid until August, once the two big viaducts above Llanberis were finished. After that it went quickly, the locomotives hauling their own materials up behind them, and despite a filthy winter the first train reached the summit in January 1896.
Those locomotives came from Switzerland, because in 1895 the Swiss were the only people on earth who really knew how to build a rack locomotive. Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works of Winterthur got the contract. The line uses the Abt rack system, devised by the Swiss engineer Roman Abt, and it is built to 800mm gauge, a gauge it shares with several Swiss mountain lines and with almost nothing else in Britain.
Which is worth sitting with for a second. The highest railway in the United Kingdom is, in every meaningful engineering sense, a piece of Switzerland bolted to a Welsh mountain.
The sixth of April, 1896
Two days before the line opened to the public, a contractor's train coming down the mountain hit a boulder that had dropped into a cutting and derailed several wheels. The men aboard lifted it back on and carried on down. Nobody thought much of it.
Ten days before that, Colonel Sir Francis Marindin of the Board of Trade had walked the line at Fox's invitation. He had no legal standing here and no power to stop anything; he was there as a favour. He walked away happy with what he had seen. He made one recommendation, which was that wind speed on the mountain should be measured and recorded, and that trains should be stopped when it blew too hard.
On Monday 6 April 1896 the Snowdon Mountain Railway opened to the public. No. 1 L.A.D.A.S. left Llanberis with two carriages on the official first train. No. 2 Enid followed shortly after with a second public service. Cloud was sitting low, down to about the level of Clogwyn, but the ascent went perfectly.
A little after noon, L.A.D.A.S. started back down.
What happened to L.A.D.A.S. on the way down, the Talyllyn and the birth of railway preservation, Cymru Rails and a Welsh special Photos of the Month. Our first special edition, all of it, on any device, the moment you pay.
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