Virtual Railfan Tour UK - Llanberis Railway

 

One of the Welsh quarry locomotives used on the Llanberis Lake Railway
http://www.lake-railway.co.uk/
It was on Friday 2 June 2017 that Paul and I traveled from Porthmadog for our unsuccessful trip up Snowdon.  Arriving in good time we were able to take a look at the Llanberis Lake Railway which runs along the lake from Gilfach Ddu (Llanberis) to Penllyn, along the course of the old Padarn Railway
The extent of the abandoned quarry railways can be seen on the right hand side.

The Padarn Railway was originally built to the unusual gauge of 4' 0" and its trains hauled the narrow gauge (2' 0") slate wagons on flat cars with two parallel sets of rails. The Glasgow Underground is one of the few other railways in the world using the four foot gauge
The Llanberis Lake Railway is built to the two foot gauge using former Welsh quarry locomotives.
Because of our reservation on the Snowdon Mountain Railway we could only get a glimpse of the Llanberis Lake line from Gilfach Ddu. It certainly was not affected by mountain clouds


A view of the now abandoned slate quarries with their many levels


The vegetation has started to take over the quarries
So with a pleasant walk through Llanberis we returned to Caernarfon for a wonderful trip over the Welsh Highland behind a Garratt.
Click here to see my blog of our trip on 2 June 2017

Video of a trip over the Llanberis Lake Railway

This video includes a footplate ride

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Wednesday - Zurich Hauptbahnhof Part One

Image
Zurich Hauptbahnhof  Paul has prepared some extensive notes and photos of the Zurich Hauptbahnhof.  This will be in several parts.  The busiest station in Switzerland is Zurich Hauptbahnhof (Zurich HB) which is used primarily by the SBB. It has 26 tracks serving almost 3000 trains daily and it is one of the busiest stations in the world. It was built in the 1870s and is a main shopping destination as well as a transport hub. There are three levels for platforms and the "Shopville" shopping plaza.  The river Sihl river passes right through the station with platforms passing above and below the river. This shows the general layout of the station with the surrounding tram tracks shown in purple Tracks 3 to 18 are terminal tracks located at ground level, served by two side platforms and seven island platforms. These are used by long-distance trains from throughout Switzerland, and by international trains. Tracks 21 and 22 are underground terminal tracks, served by a sing...
Read more

Coming Home - Wrap Up - Sunday 15 Setember 2024

Image
This video, by Noel Wyler,  shows what we have just missed. Last Saturday (14 September) the Oensingen Balsthal  Railway organized an event to commemorate 60 years of the Re 4/4 locomotives. They brought together 24 of them and ran them as one train. Paul and I flew home on KLM from Schiphol Airport. We took a train from Den Haag directly to the airport. The trip back was marred by a couple with a young boy who was obviously teething. He cried almost continuously for the full six hours. I found I could tune him out when I dug deep into the KLM sound system and found a treasure trove of classical music. Bach violin concertos, Mozart piano concerto No. 23, Beethoven symphonies, Schuman etc. We survived the stupidities at the entrance of the Montreal airport and caught the KLM bus back to Ottawa where we arrived precisely on time. A good ending to a wonderful, tremendous, trip  
Read more

August 31 - A Steamy Sunday

Image
The weather was beautiful all day. The sky was blue and the few clouds were well above the mountain peaks. We had two objectives today. To ride the steam train between Triengen and Sursee and to meet up with our friend Ruth who volunteers on this railway. The second objective was to see the steam rack operation between Meiringen and Giswil. Getting to Triengen is not straight forward but a lot of fun. We took a main line train from Zurich HB to Aarau, then a local narrow gauge street tramway to Schoftland and a Post Bus to Triengen.  The whole is delightful farming country and each item of transport adhered to the timetable. Local tram at Schoftland The ubiquitous Selecta machine is now paired with Lavazza and a photo machine, We like to have time to see the rooks nesting around the local church We arrived in good time at Triengen where the ticket staff were expecting us and pointed to where Ruth was working at the small coffee/bar counter. We had so much to catch up on that I...
Read more