Engineers on track to bring Snowdon’s Victorian mountain railway into modern era
WORK has begun on a 10-year programme to modernise the Snowdon Mountain Railway – which has carried thousands of passengers up the tallest mountain in England and Wales.
The old Victorian track will be torn up and replaced with a modern design which does not rely on a safety girder, at a cost of £2.6million. Over the past few months engineers have battled through fog and snow to lay 918ft of the new track, known as an ypsilon sleeper because of its Y-shaped design.
Since opening in 1896, some 120,000 passengers take a ride each year on the Snowdon Mountain Railway, which has four steam locomotives, three of which have been there since its incep- tion, and four diesel engines. The railway had opened six months earlier, but on its inaugural ride back down the 3,560ft mountain the steam locomotive Ladas went off the edge of a cliff. The driver and fireman leapt to safety and two passengers also jumped out even though the carriage being pulled behind ground safely to a halt. One, Ellis Griffith Roberts, sustained fatal in- juries in the fall. The railway – which runs five miles up the side of the mountain from the village of Llanberis to within 60ft of the summit – was mothballed while a safety review ensued.
Eventually it was decided to refit the rack-and-pinion track, based on a design pioneered in the Swiss Alps, with an additional safety feature: a steel girder running the length of the track to lock trains in. The first trains on the new line will run this weekend and despite the calamity which befell the railway’s last grand opening, senior engineering manager Mike Robertshaw insists there are no jitters.
“I’m not worried,” the 57-year-old says. “The new tracks we are putting in are now the best on the railway.” Ever since that first fateful crash there has never been another accident. The railway has remained open every March to November except for the war years.
A decade ago Gwyn Jones, 57, the longest serving member of the railway’s 28 professional staff, who joined as an apprentice 41 years ago, had to be rescued from a hurricane near the summit. “Still, not everybody gets to go up Snowdon for a living,” he says.