The Ffestiniog Railway: Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog

Beware: This video was shot in bright sunlight through carriage windows that needed a clean! Beautiful scenery is overlaid with smudges and reflections......

The Ffestiniog Railway is the oldest independent railway company in the world, established in 1832 by Act of Parliament. It was built to carry Welsh slate from the hillside mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog down to the port of Porthmadog for loading onto ships. The route was designed to be all on a gradient, with the trains running downhill using gravity. Pulling each one back up to Blaenau took 6 hours and a team of horses. Increasing demand for slate meant the horses couldn’t keep up, so in the 1860s special narrow-gauge steam engines were commissioned which could also carry passengers too.

The railway takes you on a 13½ mile journey from the harbour in Porthmadog, Gwynedd in North Wales to the slate-quarrying town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia. Trains climb over 700 feet from sea level into the mountains through fields and woodland, past lakes and waterfalls, round horseshoe bends (even a complete spiral) clinging to the side of the mountain or even tunnelling through it.

MUSIC
1. Vitalii Korol: Forest Time (Acoustic Folk Background Music) from Pixabay
2. Dmitrii Kolesnikov: Emotional Piano from Pixabay
3. BBC Sound Effects: Blaenau Ffestiniog Light Railway, Steam Train starts & runs
4. Josef Surikov: Motivational Inspiring Piano from Pixabay
5. James James: Land Of My Fathers; played by The Band Of Her Majesty’s Welsh Guards from Music for Royal Occasions
6. Trad: The Fairlie Duplex Engine; Hughie Jones from Hughie's Ditty Bag
7. William King: Separation from Pixabay
8. BBC Sound Effects: Blaenau Ffestiniog Light Railway, Steam Train slows & stops
9. Welsh Home; Janet Jackson Witman from Music of the Harp: Celtic, Zither & Autoharp, Vol. 1