A Ghost Train up to Tin Town; Grwyne Fawr

2 years ago

A train line to a ghost town in the next Valley

In 1912 work started on a plan to build a reservoir high (1,790 feet up) at the top of the neighbouring Grwyne Fawr valley. It was for the Abertillery Water Board, then one of South Wales major expanding industrial towns. The aim was to get clean water through a pipe thirty three miles long, down from the highest masonry reservoir in the country! All fed through Abergavenny and up over the mountain via the Clydach Gorge to Abertillery – entirely by gravity – without any pumping being necessary. A major engineering challenge !

In the nineteenth century severe cholera epidemics often struck local towns because of infection from small wells and streams which could no longer cope with their growing populations.

The whole project was supposed to take four years to complete – but the reservoir didn’t actually open until March 1928 – sixteen years late!

The Abertillery Board had a road and railway route into the heart of the mountains through the Grwyne Fawr. But the railway was never approved or legal, as it was thought to be impossible, and too dangerous to operate. The road was never built, but the illegal twelve mile long railway was, because the engineers could not have done the dam without it. The railway was in use for fifteen years, with the Board always concerned that someone official would find out. In fact, equipment and track began to be cleared out and removed almost immediately after the Opening Day in 1928!

Today you can follow the whole of the railway from the junction with the valley road at Lower Cwmyoy. Go through the wooded boggy defile of Cwm Coed-y-Cerrig to Five Ways at Fforest Coalpit, then left up the Grwyne Fawr Valley itself, to the dam and reservoir – a total of eleven miles

There is none of the 3ft narrow gauge track left, but you find ghostly reminders of its presence from the fencing and occasional railway sleepers along the way. Two miles below the dam wall, you come to the site of the ghost village of Tin Town, or Blaen y Cwm.

The flat foundation areas of buildings can be still be seen, but the tin corrugated buildings have all gone. So many: a Recreation Hall, Family Houses and Huts, a Day School, a Police Station with Cells, a Schoolmaster’s House and a Resident Engineer’s, a Hostel and a Mission Hall, a Canteen and Baths, a Hospital, and even a separate Isolation Hospital. All created for a village for 400 people – all gone – now only ghostly memories among the trees!

If you want to see what life was like in the Grwyne Fawr, there’s a book: ‘Stone and Steam in the Black Mountains’ by David Tipper. Now out of print, but you can still get second hand copies on the internet. Go to: AbeBooks.co.uk . Castaway has a copy on the bookshelf for guests to read during their stay

Two miles up at the dam, the works had a quarry, a crushing plant, the mason’s yard, a mess room, cement mixers and a hoist. All now under the water of the dam – but which appeared again in the drought year of 1976, when the reservoir was only 1% full!

In front of the main dam wall was a power house, oil store, loco shed and fitters shop, a meter house, with electricians, joiners and blacksmiths, and an ambulance room!

By 1923, both sites had electric lights inside and out, with two sets of generators and a power station – and there was even an electric aerial cableway.

All years before the town of Abergavenny got electricity itself!

It’s well worth a walk up the ghostly valley

The local history group, LlanthonyHistory.Wales has produced a guide to all this in a leaflet for the Grwyne Fawr Walk, no. 7 in a series for the area. Available to use in the Castaway or to buy from the bar of the Abbey Hotel in Llanthony

The seven other walks leaflets cover:

1 Around the Gaer 2 Capel y Ffin

3 Llanthony 4 Cwmyoy 5 The Hatteral and The Three Manors 6 Partrishow

8 Pandy and Trewyn