Qualla: Ffestiniog Railway

Ffestiniog Railway: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The line was built to roll downhill. Loaded slate wagons leaving the quarry terminus at Blaenau Ffestiniog could coast the entire thirteen and a half miles to Porthmadog harbour on gravity alone, with two brakesmen riding each train to keep it from running away. Horses, traveling in their own special dandy wagons, came along for the return trip. That was 1836. The Festiniog Railway Act had been passed by Parliament four years earlier, and the company it created is still in business today - the oldest surviving railway company in the world. Steam came in 1863. The horses, by then, had earned a long retirement.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ffestiniog Railway: A Railway Built on a Slope

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matt Buck from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. Slate built Blaenau Ffestiniog, and getting it to the sea built the railway. Engineers laid the line at a continuous gradient of roughly one in eighty, using cuttings and embankments of dry-laid slate to follow the natural contours of the mountains. Up to six trains rolled downhi...

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Image: Matt Buck from London, United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ffestiniog Railway: The Double Fairlie

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guy Chapman (JzG), CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1860 the line was choking on its own success. The Blaenau quarries were producing more slate than gravity and horses could move. The directors went looking for steam locomotives small enough for a narrow-gauge railway, and in 1863 George England and Co. delivered Mountaineer, ...

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Image: Guy Chapman (JzG) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ffestiniog Railway: The Deviationists

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob1960evens, CC BY-SA 4.0. Slate traffic faded after the First World War. Passenger services ended on 15 September 1939. Track and infrastructure decayed in the rain for fifteen years until railway enthusiast Alan Pegler, lent three thousand pounds by his father, bought the company in 1954. Then came an ob...

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Image: Bob1960evens | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ffestiniog Railway: Back to Blaenau

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RevDave, CC BY-SA 3.0. Trains reached Tanygrisiau in 1978. The final push to Blaenau Ffestiniog took another four years of work on derelict urban track, four collapsed footbridges, and a steel river bridge in need of complete replacement. On 25 May 1982 - the 150th anniversary of royal assent to the or...

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Image: RevDave | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ffestiniog Railway: The Cob

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first mile out of Porthmadog is not laid on ordinary ground at all. It runs along the top of the Cob, an embankment built between 1807 and 1811 by William Madocks to reclaim the Traeth Mawr from the sea. The railway uses a wayleave granted under the Portmadoc Harbour Act of 1...

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Image: Tom Parnell from Scottish Borders, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0