What Was Built and What Was Taken Away

Between about 1859 and 1868 mid Wales acquired a railway network that on any rational assessment it could not support, and for a century it more or less did support it. Then in about a decade most of it went.

What was built

The Cambrian, running along the Severn valley through Welshpool, Newtown and Machynlleth to the coast, and still the main line through the county.

The Mid-Wales Railway, from Llanidloes south through Rhayader, Builth and Erwood to Three Cocks, opened 1864, joining the Wye valley to the Severn.

The Central Wales line, from Craven Arms through Knighton, Llandrindod and Llanwrtyd to Llanelli and Swansea, completed in the 1860s.

The Brecon and Merthyr, over the Beacons from Brecon to the coalfield, with the notorious climb to Torpantau and the highest tunnel in Britain at the time.

Plus branches: the Van Railway to the lead mines above Llanidloes, the Kerry branch from Abermule, the Lugg Valley line to Presteigne, the Hay Railway, and the narrow-gauge Welshpool and Llanfair.

What it did

It remade the county inside twenty years.

Llandrindod Wells was built from nothing to receive visitors the trains delivered. Newtown's mail order trade existed only because parcels could travel. The drove trade, which had walked cattle to England for six centuries, died almost overnight, because animals arriving by train arrived heavier rather than lighter.

Lead from the Van, slate from the Berwyn, livestock from every market town, and coal, timber and manufactured goods in the other direction.

It also accelerated the emptying. The same lines that brought visitors took young people to the coalfield and to Liverpool, and made it possible to leave permanently rather than seasonally.

What was taken away

The Mid-Wales line closed to passengers on the last day of 1962. The Brecon and Merthyr went at the same time. Both were on the list in the Beeching report published in March 1963, but the closures in mid Wales were already under way before it appeared, which is worth saying because Beeching gets blamed for a good deal that was decided earlier.

The Van branch had gone to freight only long before and closed in 1940. The Kerry branch, the Lugg Valley line and the Hay Railway all went.

The consequence for Brecon is the one that still looks extraordinary. A town of eight thousand people, the historic county town of Brecknockshire and the gateway to a national park, has had no railway station since 1962 and the nearest is around twenty miles away.

What survived, and why

Two lines. The Cambrian, because it serves the coast and has the population along the Severn to justify it.

And the Heart of Wales line, four trains a day from Shrewsbury to Swansea through country with nothing like the traffic to support it.

It is very widely said that the Central Wales line survived Beeching because its route crossed an unusual number of marginal parliamentary constituencies.

What is left on the ground

Alignments, which in a Powys valley are usually the flattest and straightest thing in it. Embankments, cuttings, bridge abutments, and tunnel mouths.

Station buildings survive in numbers, mostly as houses, occasionally as something else — Erwood station is a craft centre and gallery.

Several stretches are now paths. Elan Valley's traffic-free trail follows the Birmingham Corporation railway built to construct the dams.

And two preserved lines: the Welshpool and Llanfair, and the Brecon Mountain Railway on part of the Brecon and Merthyr alignment.

The result

Powys is now a county where the car is not optional. Outside the Cambrian corridor and the four-a-day Heart of Wales service, public transport is thin and getting thinner.

For a place whose entire settlement pattern was set by where the routes went, having the routes removed is not a transport problem. It is the main thing that has happened to most of these towns in the last hundred years.