Two Tales of One Railway

Every model railway has two stories.

One is the story of the model; how it was dreamed, planned, constructed and developed. It tends to practicality and compromise, it has limitations and shortcomings.

The other is the story told by the model, where the engines are full size and the figures have lives of their own. It can be ambitious, whimsical, impractical and quite irresponsibly inconsistent.

Here are the stories of the Cwm Clogwyn Railway.

Origins

I never planned to have a garden railway. It grew from a stray comment, encouraged by the fact that there was no room allocated indoors for a model railway of any size. But once the suggestion was accepted, and I was sure that my wife Caroline was actually going to enjoy the process (rather than going along reluctantly with my strange ideas), we started to plan the railway and the garden together.
Although Caroline was involved from the start, it was largely my own preferences that determined the character of the railway. I had always intended to build a 4mm scale GWR branch line ‘one of these days’. But when it came to planning a garden railway, I felt that the space available, and its relationship to the rest of the garden, would be more appropriately filled by a narrow gauge line. The tight curves, close vegetation, slow speeds and short trains, as well as the informality of a light railway, seemed to match our garden.
The other enticing possibility of a garden railway was - Real Steam Engines!
I was probably influenced by articles in the Railway Modeller, although the occasional garden railway article which appeared there had been, for many years, just “how the other half lived”. Also, images of the Welsh narrow gauge railways stayed with me, mixed with more than a little of Skarloey from the Revd Wilbur Awdry's books. So a Welsh slate railway it would be...

The rain falls on great grey mounds and mountains and precipices of slate. Cwm Clogwyn, unrecognisable from the lonely green valley that it was two hundred years ago, is now a disrupted quarry-scape of pits, levels, inclines, embankments and waste heaps, and every last stone of it is blue-grey slate. The quarry has spread up, and down, and over, and into the mountains, reaching with adits and shafts after still more grey stone. In between the sheds, the tracks and the inclines, every space is covered in slate; slate boulders awaiting splitting and sawing, shards of slate waste dumped to one side, and regimented stacks of finely-split slate waiting for transport to the growing English cities.
Among the lesser-known of the Great Little Trains of Wales is the Cwm Clogwyn Railway, a meandering two foot gauge line that trickles, like the Afon y Dderyn that it follows, down from the quarry that named it, through the Welsh mountains to the Welsh Marches and the canal wharf at Iscott, whence both slate and stream are borne away by the canal into the wide world. A gallant leftover from the heady days of industrial development in the mid-1800’s, it survived into the twentieth century more by habit than any other virtue; it has so entered the lives of the valley and the people who live around it that no alternative is even considered.

Route

Our garden is a typical suburban terrace back garden, six yards by nineteen, dropping about eight inches over its length . The raised continuous circuit, all on the level averaging two feet above the ground, was chosen in anticipation of running manual control steam engines. It has been a success, allowing easy access and viewing, and relaxed hands-off operation.
The substructure of the railway - plastic drainpipes supporting a plywood trackbed - has been described in SMT 122. I decided to use Peco track, as at the time I could find no reference to anyone ever changing away from Peco. The railway was laid as a single track circuit, from which a loop passes through the main station and then rejoins the circuit. This allows trains to run past while the station is in use. The station yard also doubles as the steamup area, though the front edge is intended to represent the slate wharf on the canal. There is a junction leading nowhere at one point of the circuit; I hope in future to add a short branch past the kitchen door which will represent the quarry terminus of the line.
The track passes through a couple of walls, and disappears behind the garden shed. As it is fairly close to the fence on both sides of the garden it is also obscured by a number of different standing and climbing plants. All of this adds visual interest to the journey (both for spectators and, presumably, passengers).

The course of the railway has not changed since it was laid out. From the west it emerges out of the tangle of inclines, rail-served adits and temporary waste tracks that pervades the quarry. At the foot of the lowest incline are a couple of sidings that serve to marshal the slate trains and returning empties, and below that is Quarry Station, the official upper limit of passenger services.
The single line descends the south side of the Afon y Dderyn's valley, in some places meandering through the meadows, and in others creeping along a shelf cut into the steeper hillsides. Once it launches itself over a two-span girder bridge to cross a tributary, but most engineering works are modest. There is one intermediate station with a passing loop for trains, other stations are single-track halts with only a shelter for passengers. At the lower end is a terminus serving the slate wharves, and also, as an afterthought, the little village of Iscott Belzon.

Locomotives

The first purchases for the railway, at the Elsecar show where we also joined the Association, were an IP Engineering Lister, an assortment of Coopercraft wagons, and one length of Peco SM32 track to run them on.
Charlie, as the Lister would become, was bought as a kit, and I thought I would be quite capable of gluing whitemetal details to the brass chassis. I was slightly disconcerted when I reached page two of the instructions – how to build the chassis from brass channel – and realized that soldering was involved. However, I built a little jig and managed to get the pieces of brass to stay together, though some joints required two or three attempts. Gluing the rest together was easier, though I would warn anyone building this kit that there is barely enough room for the motor unit and the batteries under the chassis, so set the whitemetal endpieces as far apart as possible. Fortunately, I decided that the power of two batteries in series made the little loco hurtle along at a totally unrealistic pace, so I wired them in parallel. When the underpinnings slipped, and one pair of wheels started to rub against a battery, I just took it out, leaving a single battery - half the battery life, but no reduction in speed.
Cariad is an Accucraft Mortimer, manual control, and she fell off the track on her first trip. She fouled the hinges of a lifting bridge over the garden path, and fell a foot and a half to land upside down on the bricks of the path. Fortunately, the damage was confined to the non-critical parts. Peter Angus kindly repaired the cab, and a boiler test confirmed she was still steam-worthy. I decided the smokebox damage added character! She has since been enhanced with a new chuff pipe, regulator and gas handles, and spectacle plates, all from Mike Ousby. Cariad is Welsh for 'darling' or 'lover', and is also very similar to the name of my wife, after whom she is named.
Caroline is no silent partner in the railway, and wished to have her own loco, so we bought a Lady Anne with radio control for her, and named her Mostyn. One of the pleasures of a garden railway is letting children play with it. Although they cannot be trusted fully with a live steam locomotive, most children are delighted to have a chance to drive one by remote control, so Mostyn can bring a lot of pleasure even to younger visitors.

The motive power is mainly steam, though gravity trains have been run, and the quarry has also acquired at least one diesel engine for shunting wagons. The underground workings are exclusively man-powered.
The steam locomotives were acquired piecemeal according to need and funds available. The first was an 0‑4‑0ST Cariad, in green livery. There was an unfortunate incident on her first run up the line. The railway staff had not adequately checked clearances for their new purchase (so eager were they to get her running) and the combination of a bridge parapet with a particularly tight curve tipped Cariad off the track. The train crew were uninjured, and managed to douse the fire quickly. With a lot of heaving and even more shouting, she was righted, re-fired and run cautiously back to Iscott. There, a boiler test revealed no serious damage, and the twisted cab was repaired. The only signs remaining of the accident are the additional rivet work on the cab and the slightly dished top of the smokebox.
The second loco, bought as the quarry and the line prospered, was a larger 0‑6‑0T in red livery named Mostyn. This engine was run in more cautiously, and has to date an unblemished record of stability.
In the quarry may be found a small Lister diesel engine. Barely more than a motorised wagon, it is used for shunting the slate wagons in the sidings. It occasionally travels down to Iscott for workshop attention, with one or two wagons in tow. Although it has no nameplates, it is called Charlie.

Stock

The Coopercraft wagons were bought for two reasons. Firstly, they were cheap, so if we decided that we weren't going through with the railway we hadn't spent too much. Secondly, they were polystyrene kits, and I knew I could build Airfix kits.
While still making decisions about the design of the railway, I remembered babysitting for a family who had a Playmobile trainset. I asked to borrow it, to try it for size in the garden, and they promptly dug what was left of it out of the loft and donated the lot. I took the remains of two four-wheeled coaches, and from them constructed one almost complete coach. The other I reduced to a chassis, on which I fixed a plywood deck covered with weathered lollipop stick planking, for use as a flat wagon.
One item of stock deliberately bought to assist the building of the line was a Locomotion bogie coach with a Guards/luggage compartment. The chassis of this was rapidly completed to allow it to run round the circuit and check clearances. This confirmed that the 4'6" minimum radius curves - laid with the help of a borrowed track template - were adequate to snake around the corners and through the various obstacles of our garden.

The CCR’s primary business is the carriage of slate. Even so, the fleet of wagons in which the slate is transported has never been large or consistent. The purchase of wagons has been guided by price rather than design considerations.
For a while, this motley collection was the entire stock of the railway. But when there is a railway to hand, and motive power to spare, then even the hardy slate miners will prefer to sit down to travel. At first they did no more than hitch a ride on the slate wagons. Later, rudimentary carriages—open, unsprung, uncushioned—were built, and trains scheduled at the start and end of shifts. Lo and behold, other people—not employees of the slate mines or the railway—discovered the convenience of rail travel, and through some process of comment, rumour, suggestion and influence (best described as local democracy in action) better coaches were built or acquired to serve an expanded timetable of passenger trains. And so the train gradually became an essential part of every day life in the valley.
Passenger trains will stop at any halt when requested (and almost anywhere else if you can attract the driver’s attention) and the timetable is observed with tolerant affection more than strict regard. The exceptions to this latter rule are the ‘company trains’ at the start of shifts; the company expects its employees to be prompt and recognizes its responsibilities in this area. It is a recognized rule that no miner may be marked as late if he arrives on the train at the start of his shift—so those trains are almost never late. All other trains run ... eventually.

Names

I have an ill-restrained love of wordplay, which appears to have run wild around this railway. The name of the line - Cwm Clogwyn - does not refer to the valley of that name near Snowdon, but is intended to mean Valley of the Cliffs, which might be read as Cleveland (Cliff-land) Valley, or Teesside - which is where the model resides.
The railway is actually named after the location of the slate quarry; the river which the railway follows is the Afon Y Dderyn - pronounced "'Ave another 'un".  The name of the principle station sounds very much like "Pull the other 'un, for it's got bells on", but as far as I know, both Y Dderyn and Pwlddu Y Dderyn are nonsense in Welsh.
Enw Anghynanadwy, on the other hand, should mean 'Unpronouncable Name' in Welsh, and for many people lives up to its meaning.

The local squire is Lord Belzone of Iscott, a distant descendant of the Norman Marcher barons now living in comparative peace with the Welsh. His grandfather financed the first commercial development of the slate mines, and his father built the railway. Although keen enough on industrial development, the previous baron was sufficiently blue-blooded to insist that the family name should not be sullied by appearing on anything as mundane as a railway station, hence the sign that greets arrivals at the station bears the Welsh name of the village; the addition of the full English name of the village was made after the current lord succeeded to the title:

PWLDDU-Y-DDERYN

FOR

ISCOTT BELZON

Meanderings

There are many stories waiting to be discovered within the valley of the Afon Y Dderyn.

Although the slate seams quarried at Cwm Clogwyn are mainly used for roofing, the quarry also produces slabs for many different purposes. One enterprising local, realising that death never goes out of fashion, started carving gravestones out of slate slabs. He prospered, albeit from other folk's misfortune, and Huw Jones, Monumental Masons, is a respected local employer. He has even had a railway van built to carry his goods, and if you want to know how monumental his masons are, the answer is written, very symmetrically, on the side:

HUWJ  ONES

There is also a brewery, built by an Englishman who reckoned there had to be something particularly moreish about beer brewed from water that called itself "'ave another 'un"! Hops and barley go up the tracks, and beer comes down the tracks, and the railway is happy to carry it all.

There is a waterwheel on the Avon Y Dderyn. No-one knows why, as it appears to have no function, and the owner has given no explanation. Perhaps he just likes waterwheels. It may have originated in the Cwm Clogwyn quarry itself, as various waterwheels were used to power the machinery. Wherever it came from, it now turns gently on the outskirts of Iscott, under the urging of a small stream of water piped from higher up the river.