Full steam aside

The idea of old trains does appeal to me, I suppose. The sepia toned Victorian image of machine steaming powerfully through a landscape, past gleaming lakes and through misty vales is one I find attractive.

"Oh, those trains!" people - mostly male people - mostly British male people - lyricised enviously when I mentioned I was off to Wales. "Beautifully restored, gleaming with polished brass, all maintained by volunteers."

The first locomotive ever to go anywhere went along a tramway at Pen-y-darran in the southern mining vales in 1804. In the northern part of the country where quarried slate had to be hauled to the coast in the 1860's and 70's articulated locomotives were pioneered. Wales is the home of the train, I realise, and I can spot a train alright, especially if there's a cloud of steam above it, but I don't really know what else to look for. I thought I'd just go for the rides.

A half-hour drive north of Cardiff produces the Brecon Beacons, gentle green swells for over a thousand square kilometers. At the southern base is the Brecon Mountain Railway, just above the old coal town of Merthyr Tydfil where men with mine-grimed faces put in more than a century's worth of sweat and where now there's hardly a sign of all that hard labour. With the pits closed, the grass has moved in. The name of the station is Pant. A good name for a place of vintage steam engines.

Our locomotive was a 1930 Pennsylvania 61269 that had worked in South Africa for many years, hauling limestone to the Eastern Province Cement Company until 1974 when it fell down a bank, damaging its front and was withdrawn from service. It was shipped over to Wales to be restored and put out to Pant.

Two trim carriages stood on the narrow little line while our engine huffed and puffed and hissed towards us. A poopity-poop and the sheep dutifully trotted off the lines to nibble at daffodils further up a picturesque slope.

With lurches and more hisses we were soon moving past a wall that mentioned in white and red paint that Jesus was the way. Our little train bing-banged along the way to a chasm and into the hills, smoke billowing heartily.

This was once one of the deep dark impoverished places of the world where wives and children were also roped into the dragging of carbon lumps into an age of industrialization. I glanced down today’s hillside and saw a woman in a yellow pullover doing handstands on her lawn.

A reservoir was just coming into view when a sonorous voice boomed, 'This is your God speaking!' The wall had been right. God went on: "We are making an unscheduled stop." True to his word, the train came to a full stop at Pontsticill. Then nothing happened. Nobody delivered anything or rearranged the coal - nothing that I could detect, for an eternal five minutes, until the train squeaked off again after fulfilling God's prophecy. Having spoken, God then remained silent.

So were the people on the train for the most part. All the men were wearing royal blue parkas and all the women cherry red ones. They didn't seem to know each other - it's obviously just what you wear to travel on old steam trains in Wales. There was a young boy in a pale blue one and a little girl in a pink parka, in training for true blue and cherry in their adult years.

A red parka and a blue one were quite close to me.
Red parka: "Scenic".
Blue: "Very scenic".
It was quite a nice reservoir, I admitted to myself. Apparently called Taf Fechan, with a little gothically turreted pumphouse.

When we reached Dol-y-Gaer which is nothing more than a place with a signboard at the far end of the reservoir, our engine uncoupled and travelled backwards alongside us, presumably going back to Pant without our carriage. But it just made a bit of a fuss going round to the other end of the train to lead us back.

Red parka: "Lovely big windows aren't they?"
Blue: "Oh yes."
It was an all-weather observation coach, I read on a pamphlet, and one of the most popular railways in Wales. The locals certainly seemed to like it. It was one way of traveling seven miles in an hour.

Down in a damp ditch were two mopey drays as well as many, many sheep. Red and Blue seemed to be getting along well. Blue was nothing if not agreeable.
Red: "Look - horses"
Blue: "Yes"

I saw God for the first time. Uniformed as a guard with a loudhailer, he was announcing a properly scheduled stop at the same place as before, but this time he said we could get out for 20 minutes and have hot drinks, chips, ice-cream and sandwiches.

With an icy wind shaking the daffodils and my being without a cherry red parka, ice cream didn't seem the right choice. Styrofoam-cupped coffee 1123 feet above sea level seemed better. God was having a sandwich.

To escape the wind as quickly as possible, I got into the other, older carriage and found a Victorian stove in the middle of it, unfortunately not in hand warming order. A sad young woman with a gold ankle chain and a pram drooped silently on a seat while her small son clambered over everything a few times over.

All aboard again, our vintage train hissed untidily, whooped twice and we were off again. For the last heroic 100 meter sprint to Pant.

Further over to the west of the Welsh map and up the road from the town, Camarthen, where Merlin, amongst other magicians, was born, is another famous railway line: Gwili. Not a name endowed with much glamour. The Gwili steam trains run on full-width lines from the Bronwydd Arms to a riverside station at Llwyfan Cerrig, where another narrow gauge line takes over for a short distance.

It had been snowing the day before we got there and the snow was melting quite audibly. So it was another nippy spring day as we got out of the car at the Bronwydd Arms signal box. Like a lonely standing stone on the white Welsh landscape, a mobile wooden staircase stood, as there weren't any platforms. There were also no people. In front of the signal box was parked a nice blue Hunslet engine 686, built in 1898. But there was a sign on the ticket office that read 'Next Train:' and then nothing. Blankness, silence except for the melting snow murmuring "Nts-u, nts-u".

It turned out there’d been a Thomas the Tank Engine event at Bronwydd a few days before and there wasn't going to be any other action for another fortnight. Understandably.

After Gwili, I determined to consult the train timetables more devotedly. We had plenty of time to get to our next train appointment at Porthmadog in the north of the country, go to the station and check the departure times of the narrow-guage line trains. In fact, we felt so confident that we thought we'd skip the next train, go sightseeing and get the next train at midday.

There was some snow up there too and more icy winds. But I was looking forward to a little steam train that really went somewhere, preferably through lake and vale country, and I thought the Porthmadog-Blaenau Ffestiniog trains had a good chance of doing so over 13 and a half miles and back, in over three hours.

And so it was. First a wide and wonderful estuary to tootle over from Porthmadog's Harbour Station, with the promise of scenic splendours on the hinter side of the gull-mirrored water. I was just warming to all this when we swung onto the dark green land and I could get a good view of our engine ahead. No steam.

Somehow or other we were on one of the only diesel trains in existence on those tracks. Out of 148 little trains running that route that month, we'd managed to catch one of the only 12 diesel ones. It cast a new light over the whole damn thing. But I comforted myself with the thought that we'd see the other passing steam trains better from ours, without too much mingling of steam.

We'd been relegated to third class , presumably because we had free tickets. I roamed the train and decided that third was really nicer. I liked the slim art deco tables with chairs fixed before them, covered in yellow shadow-checked 30's fabric. First was all red plush and faded glory and there wasn't a second class. In the carriage was another couple, tourists from England, not too far from the Bow bells. They were elderly and they were a little unsettling. When the conductor or guard sauntered through, selling brochures and information packs about the train route, I declined any, showing him I had all of them. But when he got to those two old people behind me in the carriage, I heard Mrs explaining, "We're all together you see and she's got the lot."

Our guard this time favoured the Welsh option when announcing anything. The further north you go, the less English you hear.

"China Bull" he yelled confidently, without any need for a loudhailer. When we got to the platform the sign read "Tan-y-Bwlch".

The scenery was Wales in microcosm - all the greens for which the language is renowned, all the sheep, rivers, valleys, slate cuttings, daffodils and a gloeious lake, serenely called Llyn Mair.

"You'll have to do it out the window then", I heard Mrs shriek to Mr. He stumbled past me down the aisle mumbling "All right, all right", rather embarrassedly. I didn't want to know. But, after wrestling the window open as the train chuffed up to a platform, all he pointed out of it was an aged instamatic camera. Shakily he took a picture of a telephone pole in front of infinity. The fact didn't escape him and he wailed, "Now look what you made me do!" and then plodded back up the aisle with his camera dangling sadly from his wrist. His spouse shrilled as he reached his seat, "All of yours have spots on them anyway."

The wide open pale spaces narrowed into black nothingness as the train rumbled through Garnedd Tunnel and then pitched us out on the other side into woods and vales. At the black hill of Dduallt, after Cowhouse Curve, the train painstakingly described an upside-down e-shape and then rumbled into a few groves. The peaks of Snowdonia emerged more clearly the closer we got to our destination, quite literally a quarry - Blaenau Ffestiniog.

On our return, the man who did it out of the window and his wife, had class-hopped. I found them guiltily ensconced in red plush as I walked through.

The wheels, the guard said, were slipping on the tracks because of the light snow. Remembering the now right-way round e-shape and the full spiral that the train had to perform at steep Dduallt, I tried not to imagine how the wheels would cope. So I was quite pleased to see China Bull again. And it was there, halfway back to Porthmadog, that a real stunner of a double-headed Fairlie steam engine passed in full view and glory.

“See,” I crowed to Philip, the photographer, “we couldn’t have had that excellent view of the steam train if we’d been in it.”