Welsh Highland Railway/Ffestiniog

[John Ashworth]

Do the locomotion

Patrick Barkham discovers the fun of train journeys riding a dramatic new stretch of Wales's most scenic line

o Patrick Barkham
o The Guardian, Saturday 30 May 2009


I am thundering along what could just be Britain's most impressive railway project since the Channel Tunnel high-speed rail link. It may have taken two hours to travel 25 miles but this is not train travel as we know it: the staff are enthusiastic, the views are stunning and, best of all, there is no mobile reception for much of the journey.

On the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland railways, instead of hollering "I'M ON THE TRAIN" into your phone, there is more pressing carriage etiquette: waving. Steam trains do something strange to us all. Children lean out of cars at a level crossing. Grown men beam from footbridges. Mothers and grandparents look up from picnicking by the river. Everyone waves.

You soon stop feeling like an embarrassed minor member of the Royal Family and wave back less regally when you realise they are not waving at you but saluting the concept of trundling along a track in an antiquated engine of water, steam and coal for the sheer joy of it. And of course they are waving at Blanche.

Blanche and the other engines of this unique Welsh railway are every bit as personable as Thomas or, to be more culturally sensitive, Ivor the Engine. These machines seem particularly joyous in the summer sunshine because they can now tootle along an impressive new stretch of track.

The Ffestiniog Railway Company operates two old lines in north Wales, originally built to service slate and iron mines high in the mountains. The Ffestiniog Railway winds more than 13 miles uphill from Porthmadog on the coast to the slate-mining village of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The Welsh Highland Railway twists up from Caernarfon to Rhyd Ddu at the foot of Snowdon. At Easter, it was reopened to Beddgelert, and this month, the most spectacular stretch of all, through the Aberglaslyn Pass. By the end of the year, this line will reopen all the way around to Porthmadog, connecting the two railways into 40 miles of continuous, sinewy track.

Even so, before I take Blanche from Porthmadog, two days on a very small railway seems a little excessive for a non-train nerd. I'm not sure I am that fascinated by double bogies (or is that golf?) and the Double Fairlie locomotive, a train unique to Ffestiniog with two steam engines joined, back-to-back, in one locomotive. This symmetrical beast looks like it should pull in opposite directions at once.

I am converted, however, the moment I disobey orders and pop my head out of the window as we race along at 15mph. I'm too young to remember the scent of a steam train or the choof-choof of its whistle, but nostalgia has a pull as powerful as Blanche. There's a real crossing keeper! He stops cars with his wooden barrier! No computers! Though he has a kettle in his wooden hut!

The dinkiness is also irresistible: this is a one-horse-bum railway. Standard gauge derives from an old measure of the width of two horses standing side-by-side but these railways were built to half that size to tackle much sharper corners as they climbed mountains.

Some rail buffs may dismiss it as a toy but the Ffestiniog Railway Company was originally created by an Act of Parliament and still has similar powers to Network Rail (it can stop traffic in the street and put in a level crossing, for example). Now it has 60 paid staff, raised more than £30m for the new line, helped by the Welsh Assembly and the EU, and is sustained by the passionate commitment of 1,000 volunteers. Drivers and "firemen", who shovel coal into the engines, travel for miles to work for nothing. Daron, the buffet chef on my train, commutes from New Zealand every summer to volunteer on the railway.

Returning from Blaenau Ffestiniog, where the fireman fried eggs for his crew on the hot shovel he uses to stoke the engine, I jumped off at a request stop, Campbell's Platform. Colonel Campbell bought the then ruined Plas y Dduallt, a medieval manor house, in 1960. There was no road to his house so he let volunteers restoring the railway sleep in his barn and, in return, got a private siding and his own train, which he called The Colonel.

You can stay in a cottage in the grounds of this restored house (now with car access after the Colonel tired of his train and illegally bulldozed a track to his house in a weekend) although it was booked up when I visited. Instead, I stayed in Y Goeden Eirin, a book-lined B&B run by Eluned and John Rowlands, who has written and translated Welsh literature and poetry. Their dinner cooked with local produce was lovely and the lamb's kidney for breakfast was, er, an adventure.

The following day, I took the Welsh Highland Railway to see the Aberglaslyn Pass, last year voted the best view in Britain by National Trust members. My fellow passengers were families and older holidaymakers. But if you don't like children, you can always escape to the first-class Pullman carriage. And if you don't like old people, you can always snigger when they observe the steam engine and exclaim, "It's about to blow off!"

Before we squeezed down the Aberglaslyn Pass, I reclined in my Pullman armchair and watched a buzzard overhead, ogled a herd of shaggy highland cattle, and leaned out of the window again to breathe the sweet, peaty mountain air. The view of Snowdon - miraculously, unsheathed in cloud - was gorgeous and it was tempting to jump out at Rhyd Ddu station, where you can take a five-hour return hike to the summit. The train then slipped through fern-lined cuttings and into the narrow gorge at Aberglaslyn, which the track shares with the Glaslyn river, a perfect mountain waterway.

A return trip to the Aberglaslyn Pass takes four hours. You could drive it in less than hour but why would you? Too often we tick off our holiday must-sees as if rushing around the supermarket with a shopping list. This magical little train forces you to slow down and join an era when the pace of life and its human scale was very different from today. Never mind the Age of the Train, this is the Age of the Trundle.

Way to go

Getting there

The Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Railways (01766 516000, festrail.co.uk). Caernarfon to Hafod y Llyn (01286 677018) £25 rtn, £22.50 concessions; Ffestiniog (01766 516024) all day rover £17.95, £16.15 concessions (under-3s free, under-16s free with one adult).

Where to stay

Y Goeden Eirin (01286 830942, ygoedeneirin.co.uk) doubles from £80 B&B. Plas y Dduallt (01766 590272, snowdoniamanor.co.uk), a self-catering cottage, from £360 per week (sleeeps 4, short breaks available out of season).