Snowdon Mountain Railway — rack railway
Image by Whitechappel79 from Pixabay

Snowdon Mountain Railway

  • 1 min read
  • 53.100° N 4.104° W

Interesting facts

  • The local landowner, Assheton-Smith, blocked the railway for two decades, fearing it would spoil the scenery, before finally relenting in the 1890s.
  • His change of heart came after a rival line renamed its station Snowdon in 1893 and began drawing tourists away from Llanberis.
  • Because it ran entirely on land the company had bought, the line needed no Act of Parliament, which was very unusual for a passenger railway.
  • The line was built between December 1894 and February 1896 at a cost of £63,800, and the first train reached the summit in January 1896.
  • Its gripper rails, added after the opening-day accident, are unique: no other railway using the Abt rack system has them.
  • Each locomotive pushes a single carriage uphill without any coupling between them; gravity alone keeps the two together.
  • The steam engines' boilers are tilted at about nine degrees so the water stays level over the tubes on the climb, and they always face chimney-first uphill.
  • The summit was taken over for military use from 1942 until the war ended, and a post-war coal shortage led the railway to try burning old army boots.
  • Its diesel locomotives were deliberately built with coupling rods and uncovered engines to give passengers something to watch; one was named Yeti by local schoolchildren.
  • Including stops, a train takes about an hour to climb the mountain at an average speed of around 5 mph.

Why it is worth it

The Snowdon Mountain Railway climbs to the summit of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), the highest mountain in Wales, and it is the only public rack-and-pinion railway in the United Kingdom. The line runs for about 4.7 miles from the village of Llanberis, rising some 3,140 ft from 353 ft to 3,493 ft above sea level on an average gradient of about 1 in 7.9 and a steepest section of about 1 in 5.5. Its narrow 800 mm gauge and Abt rack — a pair of toothed rails between the running rails — came from Swiss practice, as did the first locomotives, built by the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works of Winterthur in 1895–96.

The railway opened on 6 April 1896, and its first day ended in disaster: a train derailed on the descent and a passenger, Ellis Griffith Roberts, died after jumping from a carriage. The inquiry blamed ground that had settled in the freeze and thaw of winter. The line is now fitted with gripper rails as a safety measure, and diesel locomotives from the Hunslet works in Leeds joined the Swiss steam engines between 1986 and 1992.

The journey passes intermediate stations at Hebron, Halfway, Rocky Valley and Clogwyn, before the summit. At the top the visitor centre Hafod Eryri, opened in June 2009, replaced the summit café of 1896. A return trip, with a stop at the summit, takes about two and a half hours, and the railway carries more than 140,000 passengers a year.

Getting there

The lower terminus is in Llanberis, about 14 km from Bangor. The nearest airport in a straight line is on the Isle of Man across the Irish Sea; the practical choice is Liverpool John Lennon Airport (LPL), about 88 km away by road.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Gwynedd 7The Most Beautiful Places in Wales 16The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Greatest Engineering Wonders in Wales 5The Most Spectacular Rack Railways 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders in the United Kingdom 23The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Snowdon Mountain Railway is a narrow gauge rack-and-pinion mountain railway in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. It is a tourist railway that travels for 4.7 miles (7.6 km) from Llanberis to the summit of Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales. A return journey, including the stop at the summit, takes 2½ hours.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

53.09980, -4.10450per Wikidata