The Disused Welsh Railway Ready to Be Restored

[Music] hi folks so today i'm back on the island of anglesey looking at this this is the anglesey central railway a disused railway line which cuts through the island completely from south to north so it branched off the main line down at gear to win around for 17 and a half miles to the town of amlok providing a crucial link to what was historically one of britain's busiest ports and as you've probably guessed today i want to follow it from end to end well as much as humanly possible anyway but i also want to look at how it impacted the industry of the island of anglesey and why this one was selected for the axe during infamous beaching cuts and then i want to see if there's any future for it could this old line be brought back into full restoration either as a full passenger line or just a heritage railway which could boost the island's economy and this is where it starts branching off the main line just outside the little village of gerwin not far from juan valencia gary quinn atlantis sileo go and from here it kind of loops around until it heads north right so where i am now is the western end of the village of guerun next to the a55 which just runs over there now the line came down here um the station over there called the holland arms station named after the local pub and there's no evidence of that left it's actually all overgrown the entire line between here and the the branches off we get away it's completely overgrown you can't get down there so this is the closest i can get so far but you can see evidence of it down here where there's a couple of rails still visible but heading north [Music] you can see it's still overgrown for miles as well so what i'm going to do is go to go to the next village along and get try and get on the line up there and also back there where the station was there's a tunnel under the a55 which you can't access believe me i've tried but anyway there was a short branch line which went north east towards red dwarf bay um and unfortunately there's nothing left of that because there's a scrap merchants here today but yes a very short red dwarf bay branch started just down there [Music] right so i finally got on the tracks just north of the village of clanny gethney and somewhere called the dingle which is a natural gorge carved out by the river um and as you can see the railway line cuts right through it follows the line of the river follows the gorge north of the village of clan gestni um so yeah this is the dingle it's beautiful um the dingle of course is an english name for it it does have an original name um but yes i'm on it now so what i'm going to do is keep going this way northwards and just see how far i can go just met a man actually who's um walking the line as well uh had a huge camera with massive lenses on it and i said oh you're taking photos of the line he said no i'm looking for adders apparently there's lots of others along here um so yeah i've never seen an adder before i don't think um so that'd be interesting i'd like to see one of them uh it just occurred to me just occurred to me that um although i've kind of missed out the early first few miles of this line still about 12 or 30 miles to walk um and that's one way right so as you can see it's a single track line and it always was a single track line throughout its history throughout its length um but it's in very good condition and that is simply because it was it's only been disused for about 30 years or so um so yeah it's holding out well it's nice to see it's nice to walk along this um compared to other disused lines i've seen so yeah hopefully this will carry on [Music] do [Music] right so i'm now walking down the middle of a reservoir the clincephany um because the line crosses there's an embankment that crosses the reservoir here as you can see this little bridgey bit that's the main part of the reservoir over there turn around embankment railway line and there's the other bit over there and you can see the the water coming through under where i'm stood now this little bridge um so yeah very rare that actually a line crosses a body of water like this um whoops don't fall in it's quite choppy out there today quite a windy day um yeah so across the reservoir now and we're gonna keep going um well keep going keep going keep going fair few miles ahead um the weather's holding out though so that's quite good it's supposed to chuck it down today um so yeah lucky me yeah so this reservoir was built in the 1960s so a lot later on than the line was here um for obvious reasons well to to increase the water supply to the island and so um what they did they they made sure that the the reservoir didn't um affect the line obviously um so hence the bridge there where the water flows underneath the line um so yeah rather than the line being built across a reservoir which is what it kind of looks like on a map and the reservoir was built around the existing railway line [Music] windy [Music] windy windy there's a there's a station coming up though and if well a couple miles i think um an intact station so i'll give you something new to look at right so this is cool now so i've come from that direction and i've come to clan i'm definitely not saying that right station um and it's almost perfectly intact it's wonderful and there's lots of little um artifacts if you want to say that yeah it just looks like a station that's just had a fence put in front of me i'm not sure if this is occupied there's a pair of wellies outside and there's blinds on the windows i'm not sure if somebody lives there but there's a signal box up there that's quite nice um yeah and you can see uh the cutting the the depth there this is the old platform single track line obviously little platform there um yeah what a cool little station anyway i'm gonna keep going now i've got a long walk head [Music] i've come to another station now um and this one is a cafe which is thankfully shook because it's sunday today um but yeah very nice in a cutting as well um however i think i'm gonna have to get off now my feet are killing me anyway but i think i'm going to get off the track because the track bed has become a little bit mushy a bit mud muddy here and that's been for like half a mile or so um but just looking at this beautiful little bridge here i mean there's a a date stone up there 1866 it says i don't if that comes out on the camera but underneath this bridge it's just a pool it's just a swamp and um you can see i'm going to balance across them rails but then on the other side it's completely overgrown and um i'm not sure if i can get through there um i'll give it a go but i think i might have to get off here um and try and find a way around by the streets but anyway i'm glad i got off here because there's an alignment down there and there's an old engine in there as well next to the crystal maze over there um but yeah old engine very nice now on the morning of the 29th of november 1877 heavy rain caused the dam of a mill near la merci med to breach and the surge of water washed away the wooden bridge over the river the first train of the day included two coal trucks a passenger coach and a guardsman and the whole train went over the side of the bridge and into the river the line opened in stages between 1864 and 1867 it was standard gauge but also single track so for much of its history the twin fronted fairly engines were used a large part of its freight traffic came from the huge paris mountain copper mine after the mine switched the majority of its exports from sea to rail however despite being one of the largest copper mines in the world at its peak paris mountain was already in decline by the time it started using the railway and in 1871 it closed for good [Music] right it's got really windy now um so i've come off the railway and i've come to paris mountain um which is this vast alien landscape behind me and in its heyday this was one of europe's biggest copper mines it was so successful in fact that it threatened the very economic viability of cornwall's entire copper mining industry but it's such a highly unusual place paris mountain because of so many rare and precious metals all pretty much at the surface as well including copper which has been mined here since ancient times it's so windy i can't turn around because i've had to put the special microphone on for this kind of thing um so i feel like a bit of a plunker but if i turn around it's just going to go flying it's so windy behind me um but yeah it's actually a beautiful landscape here and it's not it's kind of semi-natural i mean it is an old mine and all quarry but all these minerals are very close to the surface anyway um and yeah it's just it's just wonderful i'll i'll swing the camera around well i'll do it now nice [Music] well it's come off now so the mine here really hit its stride in the 18th century when copper from here was sent by sea to be processed in places like south wales and lancashire so the copper here is actually pretty poor quality it's known as copper oxide but it's so close to the surface that didn't matter it was cheap enough and easy enough to extract that paris mountain became a huge importance to the country now there are very few if any photos of the mines actually at work on paris mountain because photography was still rare in the mid 1800s and nobody wanted to photograph something so working class as a mine in wales but there are some wonderful pictures made of the mines created by artists such as julius caesar ebertson john warwick smith and edward pugh from the early 1800s although as usual getty images want you to pay hundreds of pounds to use some of them which is stupid because they're all engraved more than 200 years ago and they're freely available in colour anyway aside from that these pictures give us an almost fable-like image of what mining was like here this fairy tale depiction can't hide the enormous amount of effort and ingenuity that had to go into extracting the minerals from the ground here a mixture of open cast mining and underground shaft mining paris mountain would have been a landscape of pure human effort and you'll notice at the bottom of the mountain over here there are several ponds and they're all artificial they're all man-made you can tell they're not natural the square the rectangle and that's because without going into too much detail to extract copper from copper oxide it has to go through several different processes and one of the best ways to to do that extraction is to sit it in water containing a lot of iron which is what these ponds were for and of course we get at the top of the the hill the summit of the hill this fabulous windmill which everybody is gravitating towards today um and that was built in 1878 to supplement a steam engine so when the the the open cast mine got down to a certain depth i think it was 100 feet they needed steam engines to haul the minerals out he couldn't do it by hand anymore it wasn't a viable option so they used steam engines however steam engines were super expensive so they built a windmill to supplement the energy of the steam engines which i've never heard of before i've never heard of a windmill assisting steam engines um so yeah this is a case of it and that uh windmill had five sails not four um so yeah wonderful and i like that it's still there even though it's not intact um it's a good reminder of the industry around here so every mineral from here was extracted and sent down the hill down the mountain to amloc over there on the coast to the north which is where i'm going to go now because that's where the railway ends so i'm going to join back onto the railway and find the end of the line um if i don't get blown away first the end of the railway line is the town of amlok which enjoyed a huge boom in the 18th century thanks to paris mountain at the end of the century it was the second largest town in wales with a population of around 10 000 people and it was thanks to the copper mine and the need to export the metal away from anglesey the port quickly developed here and when the copper mining began to decline and the railway stole a lot of the copper traffic anyway the port shifted towards shipbuilding which became the main industry here until the start of the 20th century [Music] right so i'm now walking through the abandoned bromine uh chemical plants uh the north end of amlok and um yeah this was built in the 1950s to extract bromine from seawater and what they did so they brought chlorine in from elsmere port via the railway to here and use the chlorine to extract the bromine from the seawater and uh it's just this big abandoned place at the moment it's just the huge abandoned chemical works um which you kind of can just walk freely in even though you're probably not supposed to um but it's just vast i think i'm just going to keep walking to the far end and see what i can see so i'm in one such building and i'm not going to pretend to know what this is for and what i'm looking at but just look at this old um machinery this old technology it's just wonderful age gone by it's gone by um yeah it's very windy outside there's a lot of rattling going on um but this is great there's loads of buildings though let's keep looking so that bromine once it was extracted was then mixed with ethylene gas to make ethylene diobromide which is used in many things uh including pesticides and fire retardants and stuff like that so this plant here incredibly um important especially for the era it was it was operational the 50s 60s 70s [Music] so the railway remained useful to amloc um all the way through until the 60s when the beaching cuts axe claimed another victim and all the stations were closed and the line was only used for this chemical plant all the way up until the 1990s but in 1993 the chemical plants started using road haulage instead of rail haulage and so the line became redundant and of course it was abundant so around 93 94 the line i've been following all day was just abandoned so what of the future well since it closed in the 1990s local groups have been trying to get it restored either as a fully formed passenger railway once again or a heritage railway that we see around this part of north wales which is definitely beneficial to the local economy and from what i've seen today you ask is it suitable to do that i think so definitely i mean from what i've walked along today it's pretty much intact it's entire length the only problem really being the vegetation which can easily be cut back with a bit of willpower but most of the course is flat the track bed is is mostly intact there are few bridges are few and far between um so it's it's an easy one i think this is an easy one um and that's also the reasons why sustrans have put forward an idea to make it into a cycle track and it might just be possible to squeeze a cycle path right next to the restored railway as well maybe i mean imagine being able to cycle the length of anglesey without having to touch a road i mean the roads around here are country roads farm roads and stuff they're not great for cycling on why'd you be able to do that and then hopping on a train back to where you started amazing but on the other hand this restoration talk has been going on for 30 years and as we all know without the political will these talks just keep these ideas just keep going on and on regurgitating through different local politicians and different groups but nothing really happens so for now this wonderful anglesey central railway remains part of the history books um and it will remain that way for the foreseeable just like this fantastic abandoned chemical plant and a wonderful ancient paris mountain but yeah that's it so i've reached the end of the line another end of another line and uh that's it yeah what a wonderful walk the weather's cleared up a bit it's it was been windy it's still very windy um and it's been raining but you know what it's all right and look at this look at that view at view irish sea beautiful and a bit of blue sky as well um so yeah thanks for watching and uh i'm gonna see the next one bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Bee Here Now

Views: 152,240

Keywords: british history, working class, industrial revolution, martin zero, abandoned, railway history, urbex, historic railways, northern history, liverpool, north mersey, mersey docks, liverpool docks, abandoned railway, decaying, disused railway, chemical plant, amlwch, anglesey, anglesey central railway, bromine plant, gaerwen, old railway, the dingle

Id: 0Bt3I1XDHck

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022