FACTFILE – BALA

The railway preservation movement doesn’t have a huge war chest of funds to draw on. But on a smaller scale, in 2018, the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway re-opened Broadway station. The Llangollen’s new station at Corwen is due to open imminently and the Strathspey Railway continues to make progress towards its eventual target of a new station at Grantown-on-spey.

There’s one project that’s even smaller… smaller because the track gauge is just 1ft 11½in! But the Bala Lake Railway’s extension to Bala Town itself has more akin to HS2 than other preservation extension projects. Whether reopening a long-closed station such as Broadway or building a new one just short of where the original once stood, such as Corwen, the railways concerned are re-opening a stretch of closed trackbed.

Where the BLR’S extension is different is that it’s being built on a completely new foundation. The BLR operates between Llanuwchllyn, on the former GWR main line from Ruabon to Dolgellau, to the former GWR halt at Pen-y-bont, a distance of about 4½ miles. The terminus at Pen-ybont was always going to be temporary – but its primitive facilities have remained, well, primitive since it opened in 1976. The BLR has decided to do something about it. It plans to strike out from Pen-y-bont, crossing the River Dee and skirting the eastern shore of the Llyn Tegid before terminating a short hop away from Bala High Street.

This is not an attempt to re-open a stub of the old Trawsfynydd branch – this is a completely new stretch of railway, just like HS2! And it’s expected to only cost £2.5m, a tiny fraction of HS2’S projected £100bn price tag. Right: An early trackplan of Bala Town station. Our diorama reflects the revised track layout, which will be complemented by a Gwr-style signal box. Below: The proposed route of the Bala Lake Railway’s new extension.