Logging With Steam

[jlancasterd]

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I had an interesting assignment from the Railway today - photographing a steam-hauled logging train. Pretty unusual in the 21st Century...!

 

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[roguewave]

John, cool stuff: men & their machines. I like the steam & the smoke.

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[leica dream]

There's nothing quite like the smell and atmosphere around steam engines!

Thanks for these pics.

Richard

[ejd]

Wonderful.

[Martin T-M]

John, is it a touristic line ? It seems the rails are smaller than usual.

[jlancasterd]

John, is it a touristic line ? It seems the rails are smaller than usual.

 

It's the Ffestiniog Railway - 2-foot gauge - in North Wales. The line was originally built to carry roofing slates from the quarries around Blaenau Ffestiniog to the sea at Porthmadog, from where they were shipped all over the world.

 

The railway closed in 1946 but was reopened in stages from 1955 by enthusiasts and does indeed carry large numbers of tourists these days - but no slates...

 

Today's exercise was in the nature of a proving run to show that it is feasible to use the railway to remove logs from an area where the landowner (The National Trust) doesn't want to build a haul road because of the damage it would do to the environment.

 

The use of the steam locomotive (double Fairlie Merddin Emrys, built in 1879) was a bit of frippery - the FR will use one of its diesel locomotives if the National Trust does go ahead with rail extraction of timber from sensitive areas. Incidentally, the mature larch that formed today's loads is to go for milling into lumber rather than chipping or wood pulp.

[stuny]

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John -

 

Excellent series and story, and a most appealing locomotive.

[elansprint72]

John,

Good series. Nice to see the Ffestiniog still have some proper telephone poles and lines- can't remember when I last saw some of those.

 

Let me know next time you are playing with Lord Barton's Eleven, I have a 1956 guide to the Festiniog (sic) Railway (price: one shilling and threepence) and a 1956 booklet The narrow Gauge Railways of Wales (price: three shillings!!!), I'll bring them along. Some very interesting old photos in them.

[jlancasterd]

John,

Good series. Nice to see the Ffestiniog still have some proper telephone poles and lines- can't remember when I last saw some of those.

 

Let me know next time you are playing with Lord Barton's Eleven, I have a 1956 guide to the Festiniog (sic) Railway (price: one shilling and threepence) and a 1956 booklet The narrow Gauge Railways of Wales (price: three shillings!!!), I'll bring them along. Some very interesting old photos in them.

 

Not only do we have telegraph poles with ceramic insulators and real copper-cadmium wires to go on them, but we also have several Strowger electro-mechanical telephone exchanges still in use (plus a large stock of spare parts to keep them going). We have also recently acquired a number of 19th century Miniature Electric Train Staff machines to supplement the ones we already have - these also utilise wire-on-post technology, and will be used to equip the Welsh Highland Railway when it is completed in 2009. The ultimate back-up telephone system on the FR, incidentally, is a genuine late 19th century 'omnibus' system with mahogany-boxed wind-up handsets - the kind with separate ear and mouth pieces. It doesn't get used much nowadays as mobile phone coverage is getting better all the time.

 

The main enemy of the old technology is lightning strikes - although it tends to survive the effects rather better than modern microprocessor-based equipment - you can almost always rewire a post office relay...

 

Thanks for the offer of the 1956 guide - I have a rather battered copy of my own, bought during a holiday when I camped with several school friends above Boston Lodge for a week and visited most of the other narrow gauge lines in north and mid Wales - including the quarry systems at Penrhyn and Dinorwic. Happy days! I was bitten by the FR bug in 1955 and have been a supporter ever since.

[imported_peter_m]

What a jump in technology, a modern forwarder and a old steam locomotive

 

Very enjoyable, thank you for posting John.

 

Peter

[Martin T-M]

John, thanks for explanations. This thread is really interesting.