The Welsh Highland Heritage Railway has an origin story that includes the word disgruntled. In 1961 a small group of railway enthusiasts - including some volunteers who had fallen out with the Festiniog Railway - formed the Welsh Highland Railway Society with the goal of resurrecting the original WHR, the narrow-gauge line that had once threaded twenty-two miles through Snowdonia from Dinas to Portmadoc. The original railway had been a mess: bankrupt by 1933, closed to passengers by 1936, lifted entirely by 1942. By 1961, its trackbed was a series of trails through farmland and forest. The new society set out to preserve what survived and, eventually, to rebuild what did not.

In December 1972, British Railways sold the Society a strip of land alongside the Cambrian Coast Line at Beddgelert Siding in Porthmadog. Work on track and infrastructure began in 1973. A substantial engineering facility went up on the site of a former farm in the triangle between the Cambrian Coast Railway, the new line, and the original WHR trackbed. The works expanded. New sheds went up alongside reused agricultural buildings - one of the oldest in Porthmadog - and a narrow-gauge railway museum opened on the same site. In 2009 a new museum building more than doubled the floorspace. The whole operation is run mostly by volunteers, who maintain the track, run the trains, and welcome visitors year after year.

Today the railway runs about a mile from its Porthmadog main station - opposite the Network Rail station on Tremadog Road - north to Pen-y-Mount Junction, where there is a physical connection with the rebuilt Welsh Highland Railway mainline. Trains operate from March to November. The return journey stops at Gelert's Farm Works Halt, where passengers can tour the museum and ride a separate miniature railway before continuing back to Porthmadog. The line is short, but it carries everything the original WHR was: heritage carriages, narrow gauge, the smell of coal smoke against a Welsh estuary, and an authentic locomotive that genuinely worked the original route.

While the WHHR was building its workshops and museum, the Festiniog Railway Company was tackling the full restoration of the original Welsh Highland Railway as a working mainline. After decades of legal manoeuvring through the late 1980s and 1990s, work began at the northern end in 1997 with the Caernarfon Light Railway. Track opened to Waunfawr in 2000, Rhyd Ddu in 2003, Hafod y Llyn in 2009 and Pont Croesor in 2010. By 2011 the rebuilt WHR connected all twenty-five miles from Caernarfon to Porthmadog Harbour. In 2007 and 2008, the WHHR had opened a temporary section that briefly allowed it to run on the original WHR trackbed for the first time since the 1930s - a brief, symbolic interval before that section became a construction site for the mainline reconnection.

There is something particular about Russell. He was built in 1906 by Hunslet, started life on the Portmadoc, Beddgelert and South Snowdon Railway, worked through the Welsh Highland's brief existence, and was rescued from scrap. The 2014 restoration brought him back into steam after eleven years of silence. Visitors to the WHHR can see him pull a heritage train along the same estuary that, a century ago, would have heard the same whistle. The line is short, the journey is brief, but a working locomotive from a railway that died in 1936 is moving under its own power on twenty-first century rails. That is the entire point of a heritage railway, distilled into a mile of track and a Hunslet whistle.