Wales & The Marches

Photographs on this page are presented as a clockwise journey round Wales, starting in the southeast in Newport (Casnewydd).  They are grouped under the headings of South Wales, Cambrian Coast, North Wales and The Marches & Mid-Wales.  There is a separate page for photos of the Great Little Trains of Wales.

SOUTH WALES

The journey begins in Newport with some pictures of the famous Transporter Bridge taken one evening.  Then it is on to Cardiff with views of Central & Bute Road stations, plus a train trip up the Llynfi Valley to Maesteg.  Along the coast the historic pleasure cruiser MV Balmoral is seen calling at Porthcawl pier.

Moving further west, the photos of Swansea are almost all about buses, except for those of a rare surviving station building from the Swansea & Mumbles Railway.  Some of us who had been on a course with a manager from South Wales Transport were lucky enough to spend a weekend driving a couple of his buses on the Gower Peninsular and in the valleys.  Also featured from a later visit is First Group’s “ftr metro” bus service which operated in Swansea from 2009 to 2015.

The last train shot was taken in Carmarthen, from where there is a bus link to Aberystwyth on the Cambrian Coast.

CAMBRIAN COAST

In Aberystwyth the gallery begins with photos of the Cliff Railway taken over 35 years apart. The buildings and the carriages are not much changed, but the quality of the photography is vey different.  In 1925 after having absorbed the Cambrian Railways at the grouping the GWR added a grand terminus building in its classic Art-Deco style to Aberystwyth station.  At that time there were 5 main line platforms in operation, now there is just a single platform in use for TfW services.

Taking the train north along the coast we come to a feature of the Great Western Railway in Wales – namely its “inheritance of junctions in unlikely and inconvenient locations”.  Although the photos of Morfa Mawddach (= Mawddach Marsh, previously Barmouth Junction) station were taken several years after the Ruabon line had closed in January 1965, been unstaffed in May 1968 and then currently being singled, the name boards from the station’s London Midland Region era were still much in evidence on the opposite (disused) Cambrian Coast platform.

The gallery ends with more recent shots taken at Porthmadog and Pwllheli showing Class 158 units and the “improved” Cambrian Railways wooden terminal station building.

NORTH WALES

Only a few photos of mainline railways here, plus one of the preserved Llangollen station.  There are lots of photos of the Great Orme Tramway at Llandudno on the Great Little Trains of Wales page.

THE MARCHES & CENTRAL WALES

To complete the circuit back south by train means travelling through The Marches in England.  This gallery begins with pictures of Shrewsbury’s ‘Jacobethan’ station, then heads south on the North & West Route to Craven Arms, with a sideways glance at the sole surviving station on the Bishops Castle Railway, before finally heading down the Central Wales Line (aka the Heart-of-Wales Line) to Llandrindod Wells.

 

Creative Commons License.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.