The Penrhyn Quarry Railway was a
narrow gauge railway
A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge narrower than standard . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and .
Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with tighter curves, smaller structur ...
in
Caernarfonshire
, HQ= County Hall, Caernarfon
, Map=
, Image= Flag
, Motto= Cadernid Gwynedd (The strength of Gwynedd)
, year_start=
, Arms= ''Coat of arms of Caerna ...
(now
Gwynedd
Gwynedd (; ) is a county and preserved county (latter with differing boundaries; includes the Isle of Anglesey) in the north-west of Wales. It shares borders with Powys, Conwy County Borough, Denbighshire, Anglesey over the Menai Strait, and C ...
),
Wales
Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...
. It served the
Penrhyn quarry
The Penrhyn quarry is a slate quarry located near Bethesda, North Wales. At the end of the nineteenth century it was the world's largest slate quarry; the main pit is nearly long and deep, and it was worked by nearly 3,000 quarrymen. It has ...
near
Bethesda, taking their
slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...
produce to
Port Penrhyn
Port Penrhyn ( cy, Porth Penrhyn) is a harbour located just east of Bangor in north Wales at the confluence of the River Cegin with the Menai Strait. It was formerly of great importance as the main port for the export of slate from the Penrhyn ...
, near
Bangor. The railway was around long and used a
gauge
Gauge ( or ) may refer to:
Measurement
* Gauge (instrument), any of a variety of measuring instruments
* Gauge (firearms)
* Wire gauge, a measure of the size of a wire
** American wire gauge, a common measure of nonferrous wire diameter, es ...
of .
The railway opened in June 1801 and was one of the earliest overground narrow gauge railways in the world. It closed on 24 July 1962, the track being lifted in 1965 and sold to the
Ffestiniog Railway
The Ffestiniog Railway ( cy, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog) is a heritage railway based on narrow-gauge, located in Gwynedd, Wales. It is a major tourist attraction located mainly within the Snowdonia National Park.
The railway is roughly long an ...
.
In 2012, a section of the railway southwards from Coed y Parc was restored by Penrhyn Quarries Ltd. and further sections were planned. Events were held each year on the restored section on the line, by Felin Fawr Cyf and PQR Engineering Ltd. At the end of 2016 a new company was formed to operate the railway and Penrhyn Rail Ltd operated regular services beginning in February 2017. In July 2017, the railway closed just ahead of the fifth anniversary of operations.
History
Llandegai Tramway (1798–1831)
![Llandegai Tramway en](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Llandegai_Tramway_en.png)
Boyd suggests that the earliest predecessor to the Penrhyn Quarry Railway was the long gauge Llandegai Tramway, built in 1798. The tramway connected the Penlan Mill at
Llandegai
Llandygái (; ; ; also Llandegai) is a small village and community on the A5 road between Bangor and Tal-y-bont in Gwynedd, Wales. It affords a view of the nearby Carneddau mountain range. The population of the community taken at the 2011 ...
with Port Penrhyn. The mill ground
flint
Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and start fir ...
shipped in from Sussex into a powder, which was then shipped on to a pottery in Liverpool. The tramway would have been was one of the earliest overground railways in Britain. It included two balanced gravity
inclines one from the floor of the Cegin valley near Llandegai to the hills above Bangor, the other dropping from there to the mill. Both inclines used vertically mounted winding drums. Research in 2021 suggests the tramway may not have existed.
Penrhyn Railroad (1801–1878)
![Penrhyn Railway en](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Penrhyn_Railway_en.png)
In 1793,
William Jessop
William Jessop (23 January 1745 – 18 November 1814) was an English civil engineer, best known for his work on canals, harbours and early railways in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Early life
Jessop was born in Devonport, Devon, the ...
suggested that the owners of the Penrhyn Quarry build a tramway to connect the quarry to the sea at
Port Penrhyn
Port Penrhyn ( cy, Porth Penrhyn) is a harbour located just east of Bangor in north Wales at the confluence of the River Cegin with the Menai Strait. It was formerly of great importance as the main port for the export of slate from the Penrhyn ...
. Jessop and his partner
Benjamin Outram
Benjamin Outram (1 April 1764 – 22 May 1805) was an English civil engineer, surveyor and industrialist. He was a pioneer in the building of canals and tramways.
Life
Born at Alfreton in Derbyshire, he began his career assisting his father ...
were then constructing the
Little Eaton Gangway
The Little Eaton Gangway, officially the Derby Canal Railway, was a narrow gauge industrial wagonway serving the Derby Canal, in England, at Little Eaton in Derbyshire.
The Derby Canal
In 1792, Benjamin Outram was asked to prepare plans for a ...
in Derbyshire. Samuel Wyatt was also involved in the construction of the gangway, and his brother Benjamin was the Penrhyn estate manager. Before the railroad was constructed, slate was transported to the port by horses along slow and difficult mountain paths.
Benjamin Wyatt was put in charge of building the tramway. Construction started on 2 September 1800, with the first slate train travelling on 25 June 1801. The line cost £170,000 to build. The track used oval rails designed by Benjamin Wyatt, and their quoted gauge of was measured between the centres of the rails. The railroad was operated by horse power along with gravity and three
balanced inclines – "Port" (sometimes called "Marchogion"), "Dinas" north east of Tregarth and "Cilgeraint" a short distance north of Coed-y-Parc workshops in Bethesda. The longest was . The cost of transport fell from 4 shillings per ton using horses with panniers, to 1 shilling using the railroad.
In 1832, Wyatt's oval rails were replaced with more conventional
T-rails. The gauge of this new track was , measured between the inner edges of the rails - the conventional way of measuring
track gauge
In rail transport, track gauge (in American English, alternatively track gage) is the distance between the two rails of a railway track. All vehicles on a rail network must have wheelsets that are compatible with the track gauge. Since many d ...
.
In 1868,
Charles Easton Spooner
The Spooners of Porthmadog refers to the Spooner family of Porthmadog, North Wales who made important contributions to the development of narrow gauge railways both locally and throughout the world. James Spooner, together with his sons James Sw ...
, who had been responsible for introducing steam locomotives on the nearby
Festiniog Railway
The Ffestiniog Railway ( cy, Rheilffordd Ffestiniog) is a heritage railway based on narrow-gauge, located in Gwynedd, Wales. It is a major tourist attraction located mainly within the Snowdonia National Park.
The railway is roughly long an ...
wrote to Lord Penrhyn proposing that he replace the railroad with a new line with steam haulage. Spooner was commissioned to survey a suitable route in 1872. The quarry suffered a strike in 1874, which slowed down plans to replace the railroad, but in July 1875 the decision was made to build a new railway and introduce steam. In 1877, two
De Winton
De Winton & Co (1854–1901) were engineers in Caernarfon, Wales. They built, amongst other things, vertical boilered narrow gauge locomotives for use in Welsh slate mines and other industrial settings. At least six De Winton locomotives have ...
were delivered from Caernarfon to the port. They were steamed there on 22 June.
Construction of the new railway started on 7 March 1878 at the port. Contractor Richard Parry and civil engineer Robert Algeo were in charge of building a completely new railway that took a more circuitous route to the quarry but avoided the need for any inclines. The work was planned to take two years but was completed early. The first steam-hauled train on the new Penrhyn Quarry Railway on 3 October 1879.
Penrhyn Quarry Railway (1878–1962)
![Penrhyn Quarry Railway en](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Penrhyn_Quarry_Railway_en.png)
The first locomotives used on the new railway were three
De Winton
De Winton & Co (1854–1901) were engineers in Caernarfon, Wales. They built, amongst other things, vertical boilered narrow gauge locomotives for use in Welsh slate mines and other industrial settings. At least six De Winton locomotives have ...
's with horizontal boilers. Although successful, these locomotives were not powerful enough for the substantial traffic that passed down the line. In 1882 the railway ordered 'Charles', a large 0-4-0ST from
Hunslet
Hunslet () is an inner-city area in south Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It is southeast of the Leeds city centre, city centre and has an industrial past.
It is situated in the Hunslet and Riverside (ward), Hunslet and Riverside ward of Lee ...
. Charles proved very successful and was followed by 'Blanche' and 'Linda' in 1893 to the same basic design. These locomotives were the mainstay of the railway for the rest of its life.
There was a significant demand for building materials after the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, as Britain recovered from the conflict and many new houses were built to replace slums. The slate industry had been largely mothballed during the conflict, but now found itself in a boom period. Shortly after the war, the quarry began producing Fullersite - ground slate waste - which was shipped in large quantities along the railway. In 1924, with traffic continuing the rise, three additional
Baldwin locomotives were purchased. These had been built for war use by the
United States Army Transport Corp, and were refurbished before being sold to the railway, but were not successful, and after three years of intermittent use they were put aside.
Immediately after the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, there was a short boom in demand for Welsh slate, to meet reconstruction needs throughout the United Kingdom. However this proved to be a short-lived period of success, and cheap foreign imports of slate and new man-made roofing materials quickly began to eat into the market for the higher-quality and more expensive Penrhyn product. A steady decline in traffic through the 1950s and growth in the use of roads for transporting slates direct from the quarry to market meant the end of the railway was inevitable. In June 1962, the last slate train ran, though a few unofficial trips were run as late as the summer of 1963.
Traffic and rolling stock
Heading seawards (northwards) from the quarry at Bethesda the first (Cilgeraint) incline was bypassed by building an almost parallel straight line at a gentler end-to-end gradient whose foot was some distance north of the foot of the incline. A similar approach was not feasible for the other two inclines, so the traditional approach was taken – to increase the length of the line to spread the grade. The old route was retained to the head of the Dinas Incline where the new line swung through 180 degrees in a horseshoe bend, thereby changing from heading northeast to southwest. It then swung past a new halt at Tregarth before swinging northwards again past a new halt at Felin Hen, whereafter the line headed more or less straight for Port Penrhyn, meeting the original alignment below the foot of the Marchogion Incline.
The main line's primary purpose was to carry finished slates and Fullersite (powdered slate) to Port Penrhyn where they were loaded onto ships or, from February 1852 when the
Chester and Holyhead Railway
The Chester and Holyhead Railway was an early railway company conceived to improve transmission of Government dispatches between London and Ireland, as well as ordinary railway objectives. Its construction was hugely expensive, chiefly due to ...
opened its Port Penrhyn Branch, onto standard gauge trains. The ships and standard gauge trains took the products to national and international markets. Secondary traffic consisted of slate materials which were finished at workshops at Port Penrhyn into bitumen blocks and, notably, writing slates on which the port had a British near-monopoly in the 1930s. Paying backloads were few, but sufficient coal was brought from the port to the quarries to warrant the company buying a fleet of 50 coal wagons. The line also carried internal user traffic such as spare parts. The intermixing of standard and narrow gauge lines at the port produced some remarkable pointwork.
![Charles at Penrhyn Castle (geograph 4537381)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Charles_at_Penrhyn_Castle_%28geograph_4537381%29.jpg)
Lord Penrhyn had his own saloon coach, which has survived into preservation. An example of the second type of passenger vehicle – an Incline Carriage – has survived in the
Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum
The Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum ( cy, Amgueddfa Rheilffordd Castell Penrhyn) is a museum of industrial railway equipment, located at Penrhyn Castle near Bangor in Wales.
In the nineteenth century, Penrhyn Castle was the home of the Pennant ...
. It was intended for conveying visitors and guests round the quarry itself, having inclined seats for comfort when travelling up and down inclines between levels.
Workmen's trains were provided, along with specials for visitors and dignitaries, but the railway never provided a public passenger service. The quarrymen's carriages were unsprung and open to the elements, having neither roofs nor doors. In the frequent event of rain and cold passengers usually covered themselves with sacks to keep out the worst. Each carriage could carry 24 quarrymen "at a pinch". The carriages resembled enlarged versions of many used on garden railways in fine weather. 16 of these were built in two batches between 1878 and 1908, each bore a single letter in the series A to P. The service was withdrawn on 9 February 1951, rendering the carriages redundant. Seven survived, six were given or sold to the
Talyllyn Railway
The Talyllyn Railway ( cy, Rheilffordd Talyllyn) is a narrow gauge preserved railway in Wales running for from Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1865Drummond 2015, page 17 ...
where they were modified or cannibalised to such an extent that no Penrhyn bodies survive there. The seventh survivor was acquired by the
Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum
The Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum ( cy, Amgueddfa Rheilffordd Castell Penrhyn) is a museum of industrial railway equipment, located at Penrhyn Castle near Bangor in Wales.
In the nineteenth century, Penrhyn Castle was the home of the Pennant ...
, where it remained on view in 2016. Contradicting this to a degree is the
Moseley Railway Trust
The Moseley Railway Trust is a major British collection of industrial narrow gauge locomotives and other equipment. It originally had its base in south Manchester, but has relocated to the Apedale Community Country Park near Newcastle-under-Ly ...
which has carriage "O", which came into their hands after a long tour of various preservation sites, starting with
Bressingham Steam and Gardens
Bressingham Steam & Gardens is a steam museum
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or sci ...
. The trust has also built a replica of carriage "H".
Restoration
![PQR 1965 Event 19th September 2015](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/PQR_1965_Event_19th_September_2015.jpg)
Penrhyn Quarries Ltd completed the restoration of a section of the original railway at
Felin Fawr, Bethesda in 2012 . To commemorate the 50th. anniversary of the closure of the original railway, original Penrhyn Quarry Hunslet locomotive 'George Sholto' was operated on the restored section.
The section of restored railway was approximately in length and ran between Coed y Parc bridge (Felin Fawr) (grid ref. SH 615662) and St. Anns (grid ref. SH 614661). A second phase of the restoration was planned which would add a further mile of track running in a southerly direction. "Open weekends" with public running were held annually from 2013 onwards. From 2016 onwards, a series of "Steam Galas" and regular weekend running with diesel locomotives took place.
Whilst ‘the Penrhyn Quarry Railway Society’ is no longer involved with the team carrying out the restoration work, they continue to record and document the history of the railway. The sympathetic rebuilding of the line - overseen by PQR Engineering Ltd and the operating company Penrhyn Rail Ltd - was supported by ‘the Penrhyn Railway Supporters’, formed in 2013.
In July 2017, all railway operations ceased at short notice and the rolling stock was removed from the site.
[ The track remained in place in August 2017, but some, that leading to the loco shed and crossing the footpath, was removed in September 2017. This was seen stacked on a flat wagon.
]
Pre closure main line Locomotives
These are the locomotives that worked trains between the quarry and the port, often known as the "mainline" locomotives.
See also
*British narrow gauge railways
There were more than a thousand British narrow-gauge railways ranging from large, historically significant common carriers to small, short-lived industrial railways. Many notable events in British railway history happened on narrow-gauge railways ...
*Talyllyn Railway
The Talyllyn Railway ( cy, Rheilffordd Talyllyn) is a narrow gauge preserved railway in Wales running for from Tywyn on the Mid-Wales coast to Nant Gwernol near the village of Abergynolwyn. The line was opened in 1865Drummond 2015, page 17 ...
which purchased several PQR carriages
* Lôn Las Ogwen
Lôn Las Ogwen is a cycle route in the National Cycle Network which runs south from the NCN 5 at Porth Penrhyn on the north coast of Wales to Llyn Ogwen in Snowdonia. Lôn Las is Welsh for "blue lane".
From Porth Penrhyn to Penrhyn Quarry it ...
References
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Further reading
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External links
Penrhyn Quarry Railway Society Website
Railway items at Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum, via ''Penrhyn Castle''
Port Penrhyn and the 1800 Horse Tramway, via ''Jaggers Heritage''
Railways and Quarrying at Bethesda, via ''Jaggers Heritage''
Felin Fawr workshops, via ''History Points''
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20160819105140/http://narrowgaugerailwaymuseum.org.uk/museum/collections/industrial-railways/penrhyn-quarries/ Historical artefacts, via ''The Narrow Gauge Railway Museum''
Archive cine film of the line1, via ''YouTube''
Archive cine film of the line and quarry1, via ''YouTube''
Archive cine film of the line and quarry2, via ''YouTube''
{{Historical Welsh railway companies
1 ft 10¾ in gauge railways in Wales
2 ft ½ in gauge railways in Wales
Slate industry in Wales
Early Welsh railway companies
Industrial railways in Wales
Railway lines opened in 1798
Railway lines closed in 1962
Horse-drawn railways
Bethesda, Gwynedd
1798 establishments in Wales
1962 disestablishments in Wales
Railway inclines in Wales
Narrow gauge railways in Gwynedd