Ffestiniog Railway

The Ffestiniog Railway was built to let gravity do the work. Authorised by an act of Parliament in 1832 and opened in 1836, the line was laid on a steady downhill grade from the slate quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog to the harbour at Porthmadog, so that loaded wagons could roll the whole way to the sea with brakesmen riding on them, while horses hauled the empties back up and rode down in wagons of their own. To keep that even gradient the engineers followed the contours of the mountainside, carrying the track on dry-stone embankments and through rock cuttings that are still in use. The company that runs it is the oldest surviving railway company in the world.

The railway then became a laboratory for narrow-gauge steam. Its first locomotives arrived in 1863, passenger trains followed in 1865, making it the first narrow-gauge line in Britain to carry passengers, and in 1869 came the first of the double Fairlies, articulated engines with a boiler and chimney at each end, which remain the railway's emblem. In 1872 it introduced the first bogie carriages in Britain, two of which still run. With the slate trade in decline, passenger services ended in 1939 and slate traffic in 1946, and the line was left to become overgrown.

Its rescue is one of the founding stories of the heritage railway movement. From 1954 a group of enthusiasts led by Alan Pegler took control of the company, volunteers began clearing the line, and trains returned in stages from 1955. The biggest obstacle was man-made: a hydroelectric reservoir had flooded part of the route. Volunteers answered by building a new line around it between 1965 and 1978, including the Dduallt spiral, where the railway loops over itself to gain height, a formation unique on a public railway in the United Kingdom, and a new tunnel blasted through granite. Trains reached Blaenau Ffestiniog again on 25 May 1982, the 150th anniversary of the founding act. In 2021 the railway became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the slate landscape of northwest Wales.

The 13½-mile ride is a changing panorama: first a mile along the Cob, the embankment that closes off the reclaimed land of Traeth Mawr, then up through forest and mountain country with the line clinging to the hillside, and finally into the slate country around Blaenau Ffestiniog, the town the railway was built to serve.

Getting there

The railway runs between Porthmadog harbour and Blaenau Ffestiniog in Gwynedd, inside Snowdonia (Eryri) National Park; the nearest large town is Bangor, about 34 km away. The practical airport is Liverpool John Lennon (LPL), about 97 km away. At Blaenau Ffestiniog the railway shares its station with the main-line trains, and at Porthmadog it meets the Welsh Highland Railway, whose trains continue to Caernarfon.