Peter Johnson - The Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway

THE STORY OF A WELSH RURAL BYWAY

Front Cover : The first of the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railways original Beyer, Peacock locomotives, 0-6-0T The Earl , with a train of Hungarian and Austrian carriages at Heniarth.

Half-title page : The restoration of regular services to Welshpool on 16 May 1982 was a proud day for the preservation company. Hunslet 2-6-2T No 85 and Kerr, Stuart 0-4-2T Joan hauled the train. (J.W.T. House)

Title Page : Beyer, Peacock 0-6-0T Countess climbs the Golfa bank with the train of recreated Pickering carriages in 2017.

Endpapers : Map by Gordon Rushton

THE STORY OF A WELSH RURAL BYWAY

PETER JOHNSON

Crown copyright is reserved for illustrations sourced from the National Archives, the Parliamentary Archives, and the Ordnance Survey.

Welsh place names

Apart from Welshpool, the communities served by the light railway did not suffer from the imposition of English versions of their names. The Earls of Powis, and their castle, retain the archaic form of their name, whereas the present administrative county of Powys is spelled thus.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen and Sword Transport

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright Peter Johnson, 2020

ISBN 978 1 52674 477 7

eISBN 978 1 52674 478 4

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52674 479 1

The right of Peter Johnson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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O n 2 June 2019 the London Gazette announced that the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway had been honoured with the Queens Award for Voluntary Service.

Although the citation stated that the award was for Operating an eight-mile steam railway to demonstrate how it served its rural Mid-Wales community from Edwardian times, it also brought home the scale of the achievement since 1962, when the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway Preservation Company took over a neglected railway from British Railways and with minimal resources, grit and determination, overcame numerous obstacles to become one of the leading tourist attractions in the former county of Montgomery in northern Powys.

The railway is unusual among Welsh narrow-gauge lines in having been built to serve agriculture rather than mineral extraction.