Qualla: Hengoed Viaduct

Hengoed Viaduct: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ruth Sharville, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thomas Kennard had already lost the contract to build the Hengoed Viaduct in iron - the chief engineer Charles Liddell had decided that here, unlike at the windswept Ebbw valley four miles east, the local stone was good enough and the wind tame enough for masonry. So the young Scottish engineer took the next-best prize: design the stone bridge instead. Kennard set sixteen arches across the Rhymney valley at Maesycwmmer, 120 feet at its tallest point, 284 yards from end to end. It opened in 1858 with a passenger train picking up coal from the Rhymney pits. It closed in 1964 with a Beeching axe blow. After 1964 the railway company offered the entire viaduct for sale at a nominal sum of one pound - and nobody bought it.

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Image: Ruth Sharville | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hengoed Viaduct: The Coal Owners' Revolt

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Hughes, CC BY-SA 2.0. The viaduct was built to break a monopoly. By the 1840s the Taff Vale Railway controlled the only practical route to ship coal down to Cardiff Docks, and the mine owners of the South Wales valleys had had enough of its rates and its delays. The London and North Western Railway, a...

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Image: Alan Hughes | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hengoed Viaduct: Stone Where Iron Would Not Do

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoffrey Skelsey, CC BY-SA 4.0. Crumlin and Hengoed are only four miles apart on the map, but they posed different problems. At Crumlin the valley pinched between steep cliffs and funnelled the wind so fiercely that a thick stone bridge would have been a hazard - the wind compressing around its piers could blow...

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Image: Geoffrey Skelsey | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hengoed Viaduct: A Single Line, a Final Train

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Roscoe, CC BY-SA 2.0. The viaduct opened in 1858 as a double track. Five years later the Great Western Railway absorbed the line through the 1863 amalgamation with the West Midland Railway. The Welsh valleys produced through the great years - the 1880s, the 1890s, the years before the First World War ...

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Image: M J Roscoe | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hengoed Viaduct: A Lottery, a Path, a Wheel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. For thirty-six years the viaduct stood unused above Maesycwmmer, slowly weathering. Then in 2000 the structure was opened for public access, repurposed for National Cycle Route 47 as part of the Sustrans network that turned redundant railway lines into greenways. In April 2004 th...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hengoed Viaduct: The Stargate

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0. At one end of the refurbished viaduct, artist Andy Hazell installed a sculpture called Wheel o Drams. The drams were the small four-wheeled wagons that miners used to push coal along the underground roadways, and Hazell's piece is a great steel circle of these dram-wagons rising ...

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Image: Gareth James | CC BY-SA 2.0