| Following
a short station stop to accommodate the
trail-lovers, it was back to the hard work of climbing the never-ending grade. After
a slow start Linda found her feet on the largely tangent track beyond
Tan-y-Bwlch. The carriages bobbed obediently behind as we rambled along wooded
hillsides and high ledges, with fine views of the Dwyryd Valley constantly at hand to the
right.
|
||
 The deviation-- the first leg of Dduallt Spiral. |
Then,
at an isolated and wind-swept
spot known on the railway's timetables as Dduallt, the forests abruptly
gave way to high moorlands and bare rock. At 540 feet, we were
rising above the more temperate zone where the tall trees flourished.
Ahead lay the line's most daunting feature yet-- an outlying ridge of
the high Moelwyn mountains flung squarely across the direct path to
Blaenau Ffestiniog. In the 1830s, Moelwyn ridge had been the undoing
of the railway's early hopes for a continuous downhill grade.
Unable to find a route around the obstacle, Spooner had settled for
hoisting the cars up and over the summit by means of an ingenious water-powered
inclined plane. From the crest of the ridge, the wagons were then winched
down another plane to Dduallt. Though the system served after
a fashion, the inclined planes decisively broke Spooner's continuous
grade to Porthmadog. Only after the completion of a 730-yard tunnel
under the summit ridge in 1842 could the slate wagons drift all the
way from Blaenau to the sea under gravity alone.
|
|
 The culprit-- Tanygrisiau Reservoir stern under slate-gray mountain skies. |
120
years later, history repeated itself.
As 1955 turned to 1956, eager FR volunteers were busily engaged in reopening the
once abandoned railway line from Porthmadog northwards toward Blaenau Yet while the
FR had lain dormant and seemingly abandoned earlier in the 1950s, the British Electric
Authority had determined that the Moelwyn ridge and the basin beyond it would form a
near-perfect site for a proposed hydraulic power storage station. The work would
entail creating a large cache reservoir in the basin behind the ridge, flooding the
Moelwyn tunnel and nearly a mile of Ffestiniog right-of-way in the process. Protests
by the revitalized railway went unheeded; the land was seized in 1956, and the reservoir
filled and the line submerged by 1963. Once again, FR's line was severed at Moelwyn
Ridge.
|
|
| There
followed one of the epic stories of railway
preservation. Determined to return to Blaenau, the railway's directors began seeking
a new "deviation" survey which would carry the line over the ridge and around
the reservoir above its high water mark. An alignment was found and FR volunteers
broke ground on the new route in 1965. For the next thirteen years, doughty crews of
weekend navvies labored away at constructing an entirely new railway. Short on funds
and equipment, the "deviationists" relied on essentially same hand tools and
rough methods with which their forefathers had crested the ridge in 1830s and 1840s.
When the dust settled, the volunteers had hewn from the unforgiving mountains over two
full miles of new railway grade, including a complete spiral at Dduallt to gain the
altitude necessary to vault the ridge, and an entirely new 861-foot tunnel under the
summit. In 1978, the new grade rejoined the old route beyond the reservoir at
Tanygrisiau. The Deviation was complete. Finally, in 1982, rails were relaid
all the way to Blaenau. For the first time since closure in 1946, the FR was again
complete.
|
||
| The
reward for all this toil came now in the
short work Linda and her sisters make of the once-forbidding Moelwyn ridge.
Digging into the Dduallt Spiral, the 2-4-0 gamely hauled our long rake of carriages
up and around the curve. After crossing over our own path at Rhoslyn Bridge, the
train made one more sharp curve before picking up the old alignment of the south plane of
1836-42. On the slope below, I could still clearly see the 1842-1947 alignment, now
clotted with a thick growth of gorse and other mountain shrubs. Then the main line
of Moelwyn Ridge stood square before us, and the tracks plunged into a deep cut. At
its end lay the new Moelwyn Tunnel. Day turned to clamoring midnight inside the
bore, as the light failed and Linda's stack noise slammed off the tunnel roof and
back into the carriage. Then it was back out into the light, and gentle running
again above the placid waters of the reservoir. . |
||
| An
abrupt downgrade and a
sharp curve brought us around the head of the lake and into the village
of Tanygrisiau itself. Then it was on past slate cottages, and
backyards hung with the days' wash drying on the line, all the way into
Blaenau itself. On the left-hand side of the tracks, FR's Glan-y-Pwll
engine terminal offered a riveting glimpse of a huge and gleaming South
African Garratt locomotive under steam outside the shed-- power for
the new Welsh Highland line at Caernarfon undergoing tests before her
debut in service. From behind the engine terminal a set of standard-gauge
rails swung in to join our route, and then the two lines marched proudly
side-by-side to a common platform in the center of town. Thirteen
and 1/2 miles and 710 vertical feet after leaving Porthmadog, we had
arrived in Blaenau Ffestiniog.
|
