WALKING THE LINE

“You could once take a direct train from here to London,” 88-year-old John Roberts tells me as we sit down for a chat about his life on the railway.

“I SET OFF TO RECREATE A JOURNEY NOT MADE BY ANYONE SINCE THE LAST TRAIN IN 1964”

What’s surprising about his statement is that the ‘here’ in question is Llanuwchllyn, a small and obscure station in mid-Wales that now serves as a terminus of the tiny Bala Lake Railway, many miles from the mainline. With that direct Great Western Railway (GWR) service long since gone, my own journey there from London had involved taking an Avanti West Coast train to Birmingham, two Transport for Wales trains to Ruabon, two steam trains and a lot of walking. But then that’s all part of the fun of discovering a long-lost railway line.

There are plenty of disused