Swansea and Neath Railway
| Locale | Wales |
|---|---|
| Dates of operation | 1851–1865 |
| Successor | Great Western Railway |
| Track gauge | 7 ft (2,134 mm) |
| Length | 44 miles (71 km) |
| Headquarters | Aberdare |
The Vale of Neath Railway was a broad gauge railway company, that built a line from Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare to Neath, in Wales, chiefly to transport the products of the Merthyr iron industries to ports on Swansea Bay.
In fact it soon focused on transporting coal from the rapidly developing rich colliery area around Aberdare. When the narrow (standard) gauge Newport, Abergavenny and Hereford Railway made moves to link to the area, with its Taff Vale Extension line, the Vale of Neath Railway saw that there was potential in connecting up; it laid a third rail to make mixed gauge. The link was made in 1864 and coal was conveyed to London and the north-west of England by that route. By that time the VoNR and the NA&HR had been absorbed into the Great Western Railway system.
Connections to the docks at Swansea had not been fruitful in the early days, and the Swansea and Neath Railway, soon taken over by the VoNR, made some improvement, but the docks area remained congested and difficult.
The main line of the VoNR was always busy in GWR days, mineral traffic being intensive and difficult because of steep gradients and inadequate infrastructure. The decline of the coal industry after 1945 brought decline of the VoNR route as well and in 1964 passenger operation ceased, followed by much of the mineral activity. The Merthyr station is in use today (by trains approaching on the former Taff Vale route), "rationalised" and slightly relocated, and the Aberdare station has been similarly treated when its passenger service was reinstated in 1988.
The Vale of Neath is a picturesque river valley descending from Pontneddfechan and Glyn Neath to the town of Neath, close to Baglan Bay, itself part of Swansea Bay. By the eighteenth century, Merthyr Tydfil was the centre of a huge iron smelting industry; excellent coal was beginning to be mined at Aberdare, and these two great industries became dominant in their respective localities. The town of Neath itself became a centre of engineering industry.
Down to the eighteenth century, the difficulty was transporting the heavy products of the mineral industries to market, overseas and domestically. The roads were extremely poor, and the river was unnavigable. Yet the demand for satisfactory transport was powerful, and eventually the Neath Canal was opened fully in 1795, running down from Glyn Neath to Neath itself. Even then the canal did not immediately serve the originating point of mineral products, and some short tramways were built to effect the connection. Indeed coal from Aberdare was hauled uphill by horse power in the Cynon Valley to cross to Glyn Neath for the canal.
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