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Sixty years on the railways

Aled had just clocked on for the early shift when he heard about the disaster. He remembers a “terrible silence” throughout the yard. The chargehand’s first
words to him were: “Aled, the ‘Mail’s' in the river at Llangollen.”

World War Two had ended the previous month with the surrender of Japan on 15 August 1945, but that summer the weather didn’t reflect the general euphoria. Just the week before there was a spectacular thunderstorm in Flintshire that left an aftermath of floods and the River Dee in spate.

Nevertheless, the weather improved gradually over the coming weeks, such that by the early hours of 7 September, when the 3.35am mail and parcels train left Chester for Barmouth, the weather was fine, dry and clear 1.

To the west of the town of Trevor, where the line entered the Dee Valley, the railway was confined by steep hills to a narrow terrace about 40 feet below the Shropshire Union Canal. The railway here formed part of the Great Western network but, ironically perhaps in the light of subsequent events, the canal was maintained by GWR’s great rivals the London Midland & Scottish Railway.

At around 3.30 am, for reasons never fully determined, the canal burst through its retaining bank and the ensuing torrent swept away 120 feet of 40-foot high railway embankment leaving just bare rails hanging over a scoured-out crater.

Given the early hour and the remote location (two miles from Llangollen and two miles from Trevor), there were no witnesses to the catastrophe, and, amazingly, the block and telephone lines were undamaged so there was no chance of any forewarning 2.

In blissful ignorance therefore, the mail train approached, picking up speed to 35mph on the slight down gradient on the approach to Llangollen. On the footplate of GWR 4300 class  2-6-0 No 6315 were Aled’s workmates Driver Dai Jones and Fireman Geoff Joy, while in the guard's van bringing up the rear was another colleague, Fred Edwards.

The locomotive and following 14 vans and coaches hit the embankment breach at 4.51am. The train plunged down the steep hillside to rest in a mangled heap in the crater excavated by the flood. The debris immediately caught fire and since it would be another hour before the fire brigade arrived on the scene, little survived the resulting inferno.

Locomotive No 6315 finished up nose first in deep mud. Dai Jones was crushed in the cab and died instantly; Aled recalls him being found with his hand tightly clamped around the brake lever.

Geoff Joy was somehow thrown clear but broke his wrist in the fall. Nevertheless, he clambered up through the flowing mud slurry to get to the highway further up the hillside. He then walked the 1½ miles to Llangollen to sound the alarm. Fred Edwards, meanwhile, used the buckled rails, now overhead, to haul himself clear of the guard's van, which, unlike the rest of the train, was barely damaged. He then headed back along the line to warn the signalman at Trevor of the accident.

Luckily, if that’s the right word, Jones and Joy were the only casualties of an otherwise empty train.

Aled was in the first team sent out to investigate the incident. When he arrived on the scene, the remnants of the mail train were still burning furiously. The locomotive, although not badly damaged, was considered too awkward to recover and was eventually cut up on the spot. Access to the site was limited and it would be another week before the wreckage was cleared and even then specialist help was needed from the army.

The subsequent investigation of the incident came to no conclusion as to the cause, although spring activity beneath the canal embankment and poor maintenance were the prime suspects.

Most of Aled’s long involvement with railways was neither as dramatic nor as sad.
When I met him in 2001, Gwilym Aled Roberts, to use his full name, had just completed his 60th year on the railways. A genial, burly Welshman, and the son and grandson of railwaymen, he was helping out the Llangollen Railway acting as mentor for inexperienced trainee drivers. Being a local man, he knew both the railway and the surrounding mountainous landscape well.

Born near Trawsfynedd,  a small village north of Dollgellau (notorious later for the insensitive siting of a nuclear power station), virtually all his working life was spent on the former GWR lines south of Liverpool and north of Birmingham.

He began, aged 15,  as an engine cleaner at Crewe during the height of World War Two, but wasn’t long there before he was transferred to Wolverhampton. With the Birmingham conurbation a major target for Hitler’s bombs and railways, the principal target, Aled was kept busy, working night and day to keep the Dept of War Transport trains running.

He moved to the MPD at Wrexham before the end of the war where he stayed for the rest of his working life. It was there he worked his way up through the many layers of railway apprenticeship to fireman and then driver.

As a driver, he was particularly at home working the lines through the mountains of his birth. Welsh being his first language, he had the distinct advantage of being able to pronounce tongue-twisting place names such as Glyndyfrdwy. 3

The railways hereabouts were exposed to the worst that British weather could offer and the line north of Bala to his home village was particularly vulnerable. It ran between the mountains of Arrenig Fach and Arrenig Fawr, climbing a steep valley through a small Hamlet called Capel Celyn.

It was here, with a 12-coach troop train loaded with 400 soldiers heading for the camp and gun ranges near Trawsfynedd, that the GWR 2251class 0-6-0 Aled was driving came to a halt, wheels spinning, in a howling gale. The sandbox had run empty.

Aled inched the loco forward to Arrenig station 4 where he uncoupled the engine. He then went on alone to Trawsfynedd, filled the sandbox and returned to rescue the stranded and unheated train. The troop train and its shivering cargo eventually arrived at their destination three hours late.

There are a couple of interesting asides to this story; Aled’s wife Joan comes from the village of Capel Celyn (although they were to meet for the first time in Wrexham) and Capel Celyn  now lies, along with the former railway track where the engine stalled, at the bottom of Llyn Celyn reservoir.

His local knowledge of the area and familiarity with the extreme mountain weather conditions made him favourite to get dragged out of bed to work snowploughs north from Bala – usually on the footplate of Chester-based engine No 2313.

Nevertheless, he has fond memories of Bala Station. Bala then, despite the smallness of the town, had three stations; Bala, Bala Junction and a halt at Bala Lake5. Bala Junction was located, not surprisingly, at the junction of the line between Ruabon and Barmouth and the northern spur to Blaenau Festiniog. When the line to Blaenau closed in 19616 the three mile section of line to Bala was retained for another five years, with the station now in splendid isolation linked only by a one-coach shuttle service to Bala Junction.

Nevertheless, regardless of the paucity and lack of variety of trains out of Bala Central, the stationmaster, Tom Green, made the most of his duties. Before each departure he always made a formal announcement over the PA system along the lines, “The next train from Platform 1 is for Bala Junction. Change at Bala Junction for Liverpool, Carlisle, Glasgow and Birmingham for trains to London etc.” He extended and varied the announcement to suit his mood, changing the number of potential destinations accordingly.

Bala, it seems, specialised in ‘characters’; one of the porters was known as Dai ‘Tatws’. ‘Tatws’ is Welsh for potatoes and Dai had a lucrative sideline in potato sales which he sold around the town and on the station for beer money. The nearby pub was the regular haunt of the train crews during breaks between shuttle services. On one occasion they overstayed their welcome and had to run back to the station, making it back just in time for train departure. On arrival at Bala Junction however, they found they had left their uncoupled single coach and its occupants back at Bala Central!

The line from Ruabon to Barmouth ran through some of the loveliest country in the UK. Following the Dee Valley from Llangollen to Lake Bala, it descended the pass east of Cader Idris to Dolgellau where it skirted the southern side of the Mawddach estuary and joined the existing Cambrian line at Barmouth.

There was a small engine shed at Penmaenpool that Aled occasionally worked out of. It had only three or four engines, which were dedicated only to the short stretch of line between Dolgellau and Barmouth. Next to Penamenpool station, as today, there was the George III public house and the landlord, being a friend of the railwaymen, regularly placed bottles of beer on a trackside post for the drivers to collect as they passed.

Dolgellau, Bala and Llangollen were busy stations then but other stations on the line, such as Berwyn, were hardly used. Nonetheless, Berwyn maintained a full complement of staff, to whit three signalmen, three porters and a stationmaster – to serve the limited needs of the nearby ‘Big House’ whose owner permitted running rights over his land.

Aled remembers ‘Bob’ the stationmaster as a bumptious character who would run out onto the platform demanding the engine crew load coal buckets for his office. This they reluctantly complied with until one wild wet night, fed up and running late, they topped up his coal bucket with water – ensuring that the first application of coal gave Bob a taster of footplate life in foul weather.

Aled retired in 1991, having completed his 50th year for the GWR, British Railways and successor organisations. Almost immediately, he was recruited to drive engines on the Llangollen Railway, a line that follows the former Ruabon to Barmouth line from Llangollen to Carrog.

Since he had driven most Western engines, including those based at Llangollen, such as Foxcote Manor; he was constantly in demand, particularly if a TV or film company needed an experienced steam locomotive driver to drive an engine such as the one used in the depiction of the Abermule disaster.

Even when he considered himself too old to drive, his skills were called on as a footplate inspector and now, aged 83, he still visits Llangollen to chew the fat with the staff there.

Of the lines he worked near his birthplace in the Welsh mountains, little remains. The trackbed north of Bala, through Arrenig, can be seen winding its way along the side of the mountain above the road to Trawsfynedd, although, as stated earlier, it disappears for a time beneath the waters of Llyn Celyn.

Sections of the line to Barmouth between Llangollen and Carrog and Bala to Llanuwchllyn are now ‘heritage’ railways, although the latter has been converted to narrow gauge. The station at Corwen is still there, albeit converted to office premises, but no trace remains of the once busy station at Dolgellau (located where the Dolgellau bypass has been built). The track from Penmaenpool to Barmouth is now a popular cycleway and footpath.

Aled and Joan Roberts still live in Wrexham where they first met.

Reference sources and footnotes

1    ‘Report on the Accident at Sun Bank Halt Llangollen’ by Lieutenant Colonel G.R.S Wilson on behalf of the Ministry of War Transport 
2    In fact the first hint that something drastic had happened was the loss of water supply to the Monsanto Chemical Works at Chirk. As the works took their water from the Llangollen Canal.
3    A station one mile east of Carrog; it should be  pronounced, as Aled does,  ‘Glin-dove-er-doo-ee’ but tends to get shortened by staff on the Llangollen railway to the easier (for English visitors at least) version ‘Glin-dove-ree’
4    The stone quarry is now disused but the former marshalling yard forms part of a car park providing access to walkers to the Arrenig mountains
5    Bala Lake Halt was in fact the site of the first Bala station – although a mile outside the town itself.
6    A short section from Blaenau to Trawsyfnydd did reopen in 1964 to serve the nuclear power station

Acknowledgements

- Obvious thanks go to Aled and Joan Roberts
- Jane Brunning of the  Denbighshire  Record Office
- The staff of the Llangollen Railway