A railway of great public and local advantage…

In this week’s blog, Global Centre of Rail Excellence Chief Executive, Simon Jones, charts the history of the Neath and Brecon Railway and reflects on the link between rail, innovation and economic progress.

Not many projects get their very own Act of Parliament.

But in a dusty room on the Westminster estate lies a small, but very interesting statute from the mid-nineteenth century that tells the story of one that did. The act authorises the ‘construction of a railway in the counties of Glamorgan and Brecon, to be called The Dulas Valley Mineral Railway’, shortly renamed, ‘The Neath and Brecon Railway’.

The year was 1862.

The American Civil War had taken a dark and bloody turn and President Lincoln issues his Emancipation Proclamation. In Britain, the Limited Liability company is born and the International Exhibition of Industry and Science takes place in South Kensington, with William Babbage’s Analytical Machine and one of the world first refrigerators the star attractions on display.

The modern economy was in its infancy and the development of new railway infrastructure, particularly in industrial areas like South Wales, was proving vital to the growth of Britain’s domestic prosperity as well as its expanding exports and trade overseas.

The new line through the Dulais valley was proclaimed in the 1862 act as a ‘a railway of great public and local advantage’, designed to support the burgeoning local collieries in Crynant, Seven Sisters, Onllwyn and Coelbren and help transport the rich anthracite coal they were producing for export via Swansea.

The Neath and Brecon Railway was as much a piece of economic infrastructure as it was a rail project, by 1913 carrying over 1.2 million tons annually of black gold along its tracks. This was the western edge of what Alfred Zimmern described as ‘American Wales’, a new frontier where migration, trade, commerce and radical politics were creating a unique industrial landscape and society. From the vantage of 2023 it’s not hard to see the arterial impact of the railway. While deep mining in the area has long since disappeared many of the settlements, housing and communities it helped support, while now smaller, still remain today.

‘It’s this steam, you see, that has made the difference; it drives on every wheel double the pace, and the wheel of fortune along with ‘em.’

– George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

But perhaps the most vivid and haunting reminder of the line is Loco 2758, the imposing Hunslet Austerity locomotive of the type that used to run along the Neath and Brecon line and which now sits in Cefn Coed museum on the Neath road.

It’s probably been many years since coal burned in its firebox, but even just looking at its impressive, muscular body evokes emotion and feeling. On seeing it sitting on tracks at the museum your nostrils fill with the woody, earthy smoke that once must have billowed from its chimney and your ears seem to recreate the pounding, screeching rhythms the loco must have produced as it pulled into Onllwyn station. 

A wonderful academic we have had the great pleasure to work with at GCRE, Prof. Juliet Davis, recently said to me that, ‘You can tell a history of the world through this place’, meaning that industrial communities like those in the Dulais, Tawe and Neath valleys reflect back not just their own histories, but a wider story. They are a broader canvas on which you can see larger patterns of economic development, of migration, of carbon, of empire and so much more.

The locomotive in Cefn Coed museum certainly tells that broader story.

Its very shape and imposing presence seems to evoke the sense of confidence that once must have characterised the growth of these industrial valleys in South Wales. The Neath and Brecon Railway wasn’t built out of charity, it was a hard headed, commercial decision to harness the expanding potential of the valuable goods and products being produced nearby.

Economic progress and rail have been intertwined for centuries, one reinforcing the need for the other. Like other areas of rapid economic expansion, the growth of industry is closely mirrored by the spread of the connective infrastructure needed to support it. Any map of the pre-Beeching valleys is about as good an introduction as you’d get to the remarkable story of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial South Wales.

Of course we know what happened later.

De-industrialisation through the inter-war years and beyond had a profound impact on those arteries of people and communities created by the growth of mining in the area. The contraction of major employment and the loss of jobs dented the sense of confidence that the Dulais, Tawe and Neath Valleys must have once felt.

Many of the challenges local communities in the area still feel have their roots in that long-term process of economic contraction and the lack of any large scale industrial activity to replace what was once there.

And it’s that story of the past – the industrial history of the places around the Global Centre of Rail Excellence – that again hits home as we take forward our own project. Might the coming of the Global Centre of Rail Excellence, a new frontier of world class rail research, engineering and innovation, return growth, jobs and prosperity to these valleys once again? Might GCRE be the spark for a new economic identity locally?

It’s important not to overclaim the impact any single project can make. ‘Under-promise and over-deliver’ is certainly the mantra I’ve always preached as Chief Executive of the GCRE project. But I do hope that GCRE can play an important contributory role in supporting the economic re-birth of valleys nearby. In part re-capturing some of the sense of optimism and confidence that once hallmarked the growth of the towns and villages in them.

As we have remarked on before in these blog pages, with the coming of the Global Centre of Rail Excellence it’s the continuities with the past that are striking, not the dislocations. These have been valleys of innovation, manufacturing and highly skilled industry for centuries. GCRE is just the next chapter of that rich industrial story.

I certainly hope that GCRE is seen in the same way as that 1862 act saw what later became the Neath and Brecon line, ‘a railway of great public and local advantage’.

Because that is certainly our intention.