 Pulling into Dolgoch. In a moment, the Tom Rolt will stop at the water tank, and guard Ben Abbott will alight to take the tickets of the family waiting at the shelter.
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Dolgoch
was our watering stop, and again the crew
wasted no time-- within moments of our halt, Chris was out on the pilot, pulling down the
spout from a square water tank set high on a spindly iron frame. While the engine
crew replaced the water the Tom Rolt had consumed ascending this far our guard,
Ben Abbott, alighted from his compartment just behind Samantha's and mine to take the
tickets of a family of six who had been waiting patiently for the train at the platform
shelter. Dolgoch Falls are a beauty spot of some repute, and the TR has laid out a
series of paths and nature walks from the station down to the cascades. Patrons are
encouraged to catch the morning train, detrain at Dolgoch to enjoy the falls and a picnic
lunch, and then continue their journey to Nant Gwernol and return on "The
Quarryman" in the afternoon. It seems that on this day at least the railway had
had takers on the offer.
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 Tom Rolt fights the grade at Milepost 6.75. |
The
watering stop was timely, for ahead lay the
last and hardest leg of our journey: two and one-half miles of steeply graded track, in
the course of which we would climb over 80 more feet above sea level. Hardly had we
left the platform when the Tom Rolt began straining hard to carry us up the
sustained grades; when the incline steepened briefly to better than 1.3%, the column of
steam from the 0-4-2's stack was a sight to behold. The higher we climbed, the
narrower grew the right-of-way on which we were travelling, until finally we were winding
along a pronounced ledge, carved into the steep shoulders of Mynydd Tan-y-Coed, Foel Fach,
and Foel Fawr by the railway's original grading gangs back in 1865.
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| As we
climbed along our ledge, the train passed
beyond the headwaters of the Afon Fathew, and on into the watershed of the Afon Dysynni--
the lovely, fast-flowing stream which pours down from the Railway's namesake lake of
Tal-y-llyn to the north, and on toward an outlet to the sea beyond Tywyn. Once the
Dysynni ran all the way to the sea straight down the Talyllyn's valley, but at some point
a tremendous glacial moraine laid down at what is now Abergynolwyn diverted its course
into the next valley to the north. The Dysynni's abrupt diversion leaves the
Talyllyn Railway in an odd situation: the train traverses a single continuous valley, but
the valley is occupied by two wholly separate rivers.
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| Just as
we passed the dry valley between the two
watersheds, we paused briefly at a halt known on the railway's timetables as Abergynolwyn
Station. For 110 years, Abergynolwyn Station marked the uppermost limit of passenger
service on the railway-- only slate wagons passed beyond to Nant Gwernol. Since the
town of Abergynolwyn is sited by the banks of the Dysynni on the valley floor far below,
while the railway at this point is clinging hard to the mountain shoulders and fighting
for every inch of altitude, there could be no question of locating a station in the town
proper. Instead, villagers faced a long walk south of town along a small tributary
of the Dysynni and then high up to trackside if they wished to catch the steam cars to
Tywyn. Not until 1976 did the Railway open passenger service all the way to the end
of track at Nant Gwernol-- and then only by obtaining a Parliamentary Order under the
Light Railways Act to amend the Railway's original, restrictive charter!
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 Negotiating the reverse-curves at the entrance to the Nant Gwernol. |
After
our short pause at Abergynolwyn Station, we
were off again: now no further stops remained before we reached the end of the line
itself. A few hundred yards beyond the station platform, the train snaked past a
large wooden drum abandoned at the trackside to the left: all that remained of a winding
house which once inched goods wagons down a steep inclined plain, and into the town of
Abergynolwyn proper. Just at this point, the track swung abruptly to the south, and
plunged into the steep ravine of the Nant Gwernol. A series of reverse curves bought
us ever deeper into the gorge, and the mountains closed in on either hand. Hemmed in
now by the stone walls of the gorge, the Tom Rolt's exhaust blasts cracked
sharply back, and filled our ears with the sound of a working steam locomotive fighting
hard for altitude. Finally, after a series of flange- squealing bends, we rounded a
high spur of rock and emerged onto a slightly wider ledge, which proved just sufficient to
hold a passing track and an adjacent platform. As the train shuddered to a halt with
a whoosh of braking air, an untoward silence fell. We had arrived at Nant Gwernol.
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