BackTrack
Whilst collecting stock for the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway stand at the 2021 Leiston Works Railway model railway exhibition, I stumbled across a 1952 edition of Trains Illustrated. This included a short article on the then recent closure of the Mid-Suffolk. Also among the 30 odd pages of this magazine was a short article by John Bourne commencing with the intriguing statement that “Strong local opposition has been a roused by the Railway Executive's proposal to withdraw the passenger train service from the Burry Port & Gwendraeth Valley Railway.” Noting that this line was not far from the area of South Wales which was the home of the maternal side of my wife's family (the men being coal face ‘hewers’ descended from Cornish and Irish miners), I wondered what happened next.
Research revealed a railway with a fascinating and varied history, set up as a coal line but with informal passenger services for miners, recast as a Light Railway for the carriage of passengers, impecunious finances, alleged poor management, the involvement of the redoubtable Colonel Stephens, purchase by the Great Western Railway (GWR) and 50 years of passenger service and 60 years of freight!
This article is my take on that story. It focusses on the railway line from Burry Port up the Gwendraeth valley to Cwmmawr.
Background
One of the two streams of the South Wales Gwendraeth River rises east of the village of Cwmmawr, just below Cross Hands. It descends its valley to discharge into Carmarthen Bay south of Kidwelly. This area was peppered with coalmines with fertile farmland around its lower reaches. Mine owners and others sought more efficient means of getting their products to the market and the sea. The Kidwelly & Llanelly Canal, initially opened in 1766, preceded wagonways and then plateways/ early railways built to connect the mines with the canal. Burry Port harbour was opened in 1832 by the canal company and a town sprang up around the dock.
Around that time revival of the Carmarthenshire Railway, built as a plateway in 1804 to bring down minerals from Cross Hands to Llanelly harbour, was being muted. The Llanelly Railway & Dock Company (LR&D) opened a line from Llanelly to serve pits in the Cwmamman area to the east of Cwnmmawr. This railway extended to Cross Hands and Llandeilo. In 1861 the LR&D achieved Parliamentary powers to extend from Llandeilo to Carmarthen, and its line opened to goods trains in 1864.
The scheme
The Carmarthen & Cardigan Railway, and the other schemes mentioned above, challenged the Kidwelly & Llanelly Canal and Tramroad Company. To maintain its business, the canal company submitted a Parliamentary Bill to transform the outmoded canal into a railway. Royal Assent was achieved on 5th July 1865 and the Canal Company changed its name to The Kidwelly & Burry Port Railway Company (K&BPR). It absorbed an earlier canal built by Thomas Kymer to bring coal down the valley and set out to construct new railways
