Llanelli and Mynydd Mawr Railway PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
THE Llanelli and Mynydd Mawr Railway is a new heritage railway just entering its third full season in operation. It may be short at present and a little off the beaten track, but it has a history dating right back to the very beginning of the railways, encompassing the eras of king coal and the super pit.
The single ribbon of track skirting the small hamlet of Cynheidre five miles north of Llanelli stands as a testament to nearly 220 years of rail-borne transport in the Gwendraeth Valley: first as part of the pioneering Carmarthenshire Tram-road, opening up links to the coalfields north of Llanelli, and then, after a period of disuse, much of the formation was used as the basis of the then Llanelly (the anglicised form of Llanelli) and Mynydd Mawr Railway, linking several collieries to the port.
Finally, following afurther period of decline in the years after the Second World War when the demand for coal reduced, the line flourished once more as a major coal-carrying artery after the opening of one of the UK’s ‘super pits’ at Cynheidre.
Even this could not survive the inevitable decline of the coal industry in the 1980s, and following its final abandonment, things looked bleak for this most long-lived of railways – until the preservationists arrived, led by the charismatic Desmond Thomas, ably supported by Martin Doe and Richard Roper, and they began to develop a new railway on the site of the former colliery at Cynheidre.
The Carmarthenshire Tram-road
Although less well-known than the Mumbles railway, which started out as an industrial tramway in 1804-5, and the Surrey Iron railway which opened in 1803, the Carmarthenshire Tram-road or Railway eclipses both and dates from 1802. This fact is recorded on a blue plaque attached to the road over bridge at Cynheidre, which states it was the first operational public railway in Great Britain authorised by an Act of Parliament. In fact, the act was required in order to acquire an already existent feeder tramway to the Carmarthenshire
