Snowdonia to Kent discovering the beauty of Britain’s narrow-gauge railway

As with so many aspects of my life, it started in a pub.

My former publisher had rung up to enquire: “Do you fancy doing a travel book for the AA?”

He said that he would tell me the details when we met up. He had hardly had time to pick up his pint before I was pressing him to reveal what the AA could want from me.

“A guide to narrow-gauge railways in the UK,” he said through frothy lips. “That’s a bit anorakish, isn’t it?” was my somewhat ungrateful response.

“No, don’t write it for the buffs … well, put in a bit for them, but mainly describe what you see on both sides of the train window.”

There was more than enough to see and hear when I travelled on five lines in five days, scything through a glut of glorious countryside in north and west Wales.

The best and worst sides of the extended family were on full display at most times. But perhaps the most bizarre behaviour came from an elderly couple who boarded the last train out of Porthmadog on the fabled Ffestiniog Railway at the very last minute.

He was munching Maltesers while she was taking the first bite out of a Snickers Bar. “He’s in our seat,” she said in a strong Yorkshire accent, slightly muffled by chocolate.

“He is,” her husband confirmed. Although slightly baffled by being referred to in the third person, I stood up immediately and offered to move. “No, he’s all right,” said Snickers woman.”

“Aye, he is,” said he, leading the way to an adjoining table where he began bending her ear with a description of a journey he had made on the Scarborough to Pickering line, seemingly oblivious to the beauty that began to unfold beyond the window almost as soon as we had set off towards the former slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog.

It is worth remembering that quite a few of these little lines that provide us with so much pleasure were set up originally to transport the products of back-breaking and dangerous work underground.

They were built largely on the whims of wealthy men – mine and quarry owners in many cases – to get to the parts that main-line trains couldn’t reach.

Blasting tunnels was an expensive business. The narrower gauge gave the trains the flexibility to get around hills and mountains. Up the side of them, too, in some cases.

One weekend I found myself travelling to the summit of Snowdon a week after stepping on to the flat shingle of Dungeness, Britain’s only official desert, watching flocks of exotic birds explode across an expansive skyline.

It was a reminder that while large parts of our towns and cities have become depressingly similar the rural landscape of this small, offshore island is stunningly varied.

Particularly, it must be said, in those tucked-away parts that so many of these railways were designed to reach. Dungeness, incidentally, is at the far end of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch line in Kent, set up by a wealthy racing driver from the Roaring Twenties with a very long name and a very large bank balance.

And Snowdon? Well, the term “tucked away” doesn’t quite apply in that case. Those of us who travelled to the summit on a single-carriage train were in the minority on a Sunday morning.

There were many more travellers on foot, some of them wielding sticks, others straining to cling on to taut dog leads. So crowded was it at the summit that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Big Issue seller.

An American lady who asked the manager whether there was a branch of Marks and Spencer up there didn’t sound so daft after all. The Snowdon Mountain Railway was one of just two of the many narrow-gauge lines that I travelled on that are run entirely by professionals.

Most are heavily dependent on volunteers – and always have been. On the Ffestiniog, for instance, the volunteer army was led by one Alan Pegler, a Falstaffi an character who hadlost the family fortune by buying the Flying Scotsman and shipping it to America – only to discover it would be banned as a fi re hazard in many states. 

Corpulent and be-whiskered, he had made some of that money back by impersonating Henry VIII at the Tower of London 700 times. And the Ffestiniog today?

Well, our train was driven by a volunteer from Leicester and the guard wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the 8.15 from Guildford to Waterloo.

On the Sittingbourne to Kemsley Light Railway in Kent, I came across a woman fi ring one of the engines who turned out to be a freelance surveyor from Brighton. And on the Leadhills to Wanlockhead line, in the wilds of Scotland, our driver had a broad Dublin accent but drove up from his home in Cumbria every weekend.

It was on that remote Scottish railway that I chose to do the chapter on the Santa Special.

On a sunny Saturday morning in December I found myself at one point tumbling down an extremely steep embankment en route to visit Father Christmas down a disused lead mine that had closed in 1830.

That was one of two occasions when things happened on this “narrow-gauge adventure” that could easily have resulted in a visit to A and E.

The other bruising brush with danger happened after a glorious early autumn day when I found myself in Ravenglass, a delightful Cumbrian port.

The railway had kindly offered me the opportunity to stay the night in a former first-class Pullman carriage called the Maid of Kent that was parked on a main-line siding adjoining the narrow-gauge line to Eskdale.

What they didn’t tell me was to bring a torch. That became evident after I emerged from the nearby Ratty Arms where I’d gone for a pint and a bite to eat.

Groping your way across railway lines in pitch darkness can be a sobering and challenging experience, believe me. The air was blue but luckily nobody was around to hear it.

When I was finally reunited with the Maid and turned on the telly, there was Michael Portillo reclining on a particularly plush seat on one of his Great Continental Railway Journeys.

“It’s all right for some,” I grumped at the time. But after the next day’s ride through some of the UK’s most glorious countryside I needed no convincing that researching this book had been more than all right for me.

To order Small Island By Little Train: A Narrow-Gauge Adventure by Chris Arnot (AA Publishing, £16.99) with free UK delivery, call the Express Bookshop with your card details on 01872 562310.

Alternatively send a cheque/PO payable to The Express Bookshop to: Chris Arnot Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.com