Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr Railway
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The Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr Railway was authorised in 1875. It made use of part of the long defunct Carmarthenshire Railway or Tramroad of 1801. The older line began running trains in 1803, and was a plateway of about 4 feet gauge, with horse traction, for the purpose of bringing minerals from the Mynydd Mawr to the sea for onward shipment at Llanelly Docks.
The Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr line opened in 1881, worked by the contractor, John Waddell, who had built the line and taken a majority of the shares. The fortunes of the company were closely bound with those of the mineral industries, which fluctuated considerably. The Company considered operating a public passenger service but never did so, although workmen's trains were operated for some years. The decline of coal mining in the area seemed tp be reversed when the huge new Cynheidre Pit was established in the 1960s, but the railway capacity enhancements to deal with the expected upsurge in traffic proved to be unnecessary. The line closed completely in 1989.
The Local Government Act 1972 created new Welsh counties all of which had Welsh-language names, and many towns opted to change their name at about the same time. The town of Llanelly had already changed its name to Llanelli in 1966 by local demand. The historic names of railway companies and locations are used in this article where appropriate to the period. Some names have variant spellings in source material, for example Cwm Mawr / Cwmmawr.
In the 1760s the area around Llanelly had considerable colliery activity, and there were five short canals from pits to the sea shore; the heavy mineral was brought to shipping for onward transport, at a time when there were no usable roads or railways.
In 1769 Kymer's Canal was opened between pits in the Gwendraeth Valley and the coast; there were a number of basic wooden tramways in connection with it, covering the short distance between the mouth of the pits and the nearby canal.
At the time coal was loaded into ships at Llanelly by beaching them on the mudflats, or using lighters to ferry coal out to larger vessels anchored off-shore. Wharves were an obvious solution, and one of the first was built in 1795 to serve a canal from pits owned by William Roderick, Thomas Bowen and Margaret Griffiths. This was later developed as the Pemberton's Dock.
In March 1797 Alexander Raby arranged a lease with Dame Mary Mansell, owner of the Stradey Estate, entitling him to work coal measures on the estate. Raby undertook to mine 5,000 tons of coal annually and there were penalties if he failed to do so (or to pay the corresponding royalty). In January 1798 he concluded further leases on the property, and one of these authorised him to construct his own tramroad to connect his coal and ironworks with a new shipping place on the mudflats at Llanelly. Raby's 'new iron way' was built on the alignment of an earlier waggonway which had linked the Caemain pit with what was then the beach at Sandy.
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