| Throughout
North Wales there broods a presence.
From Blaenau, from Porthmadog, from Bangor or from Caernarfon one can feel it in the
background, tingling between one's shoulder-blades, or sometimes catch glimpses of it from
the corner of one's eye: Snowdon, Yr Wyddfa, the highest mountain in all of
Wales. I had felt its pull throughout my sojourn in that country, and on our last
full day in Wales, Samantha and I were ready to experience it first hand. From
Caernarfon we turned our car inland, and rambled along country lanes through rolling
hills. At length, the hills began to mount, and the lane plunged deeper into a
valley. A few corkscrew turns more, and suddenly the landscape opened up into one of
the most breathtaking vistas I have ever seen. Before us lay a wide, U-shaped
valley. Nestled in its gentle floor, a long gleaming lake. On a crag of land
protruding into the lake, a romantic, ruinous castle. And above it all, brooding
down on the verdant valley, the high vaults and crags of Snowdon itself. Stung to
the quick by the sheer beauty of it, I blurted out to Sam "my God, it looks just like
a Turner painting!" Moments later, I had the grace to blush-- this was
Llanberis Lake, and if it looked like one of J.M.W. Turner's famous romantic landscapes,
well, that's because it is one of his famous romantic landscapes, and has been
reproduced and reprinted countless times. Sometimes art anticipates life a little
too faithfully.
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 Engines simmer at Snowdon Mountain Railway's Llanberis terminus. |
At the
foot of Yr Wyddfa, not far from the
lakeshore, we found a railway depot huddled in a rambling cluster of frame
buildings. From behind the station there issued a set of narrow-gauge rails, leading
away to a long signal bridge and a wide engine shed. Smoke drifted over the complex,
wafting from a pair of steam tank engines simmering in the yards. The sharp fumes
from the engines' stacks swirled about in orange-brown trailers, giving the scene a
nineteenth-century, industrial revolution feel.
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 SMR engine and carriage ready for duty in the Llanberis yards. |
It was
a steam railway yard, charming in and of
itself but not much different from the others I had seen already in my travels. Yet the
rails themselves were very different. Within each line of track there
nestled a knobbed, grease-stained third rail. Even had I not known it in advance,
that rail was enough to give the game away: this was a rack railway, a railway whose
engines actually ratchet themselves up grades too steep for simple adhesion to
conquer. We had found the Llanberis terminal of the Snowdon Mountain Railway, the oldest and indeed the only rack railway in all of
Britain. In its cars, we would ascend high Snowdon itself.
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