Free On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Page B

pulleys that raise or lower heavy pieces of machinery in a tradition that goes back to the very birth of the railway. This is a world of technology that has barely heard of the microchip, let alone the LED, yet is as safe, in its clunking mechanical way, as anything that has come since. The train picks up speed past the spoil tips that once defined this former coal and steel town, now overgrown with grass. There is evidence of its other heritage too. The hillside to the west was once home to twenty-four chapels and three churches, though these are now swamped by dreary modern housing estates. We pass through the remains of several little wayside stations, closed in the 1960s but with solid buildings refusing to die amid the undergrowth, and eventually pull up at Ruabon, whose Tudor-style stone station is sadly boarded up, leaving today’s passengers to huddle in a miserable bus shelter on the platform. Here you could once change trains for Llangollen (‘alight here for the Eisteddfod’) and Barmouth on the coast – though luckily a stretch of this line survives as the Llangollen Railway, one of the most popular preserved lines in Wales.
    Running through the remains of Cefn station, closed in 1960, even before Beeching, those with keen ears can hear a change in the note of the wheels on the track as the train rattles onto the Cefn–Mawr Viaduct. Built in 1848 of the local pale golden stone this spectacular structure has nineteen arches and is 147 feet high. The local landowners who opposed it so vigorously at the time of its building could hardly have imagined its mellow fit with the landscape today. Such was the level of local opposition that the Scottish designer Henry Robertson had to carry out his surveys by night, since objectors threatened to ‘throw the man and his theodolite into the canal’, according to reports at the time. But, as in so many cases with railways such as this, the engineering was done with supreme good taste, using good local materials. After all, who wouldn’t want a bit of distinguished architecture at the end of your estate, built by the likes, in this case, of the most distinguished civil engineer of the day, Thomas Brassey? The truth was that the wealthy landowners who threw tantrums were merely after the best compensation terms. Afterwards, they sat in their country houses and enjoyed both the cash and the trains.
    On the east side of the line there is the great loop of the River Dee; on the west the view is of Offa’s Dyke, and a mile upstream you can see the famous Pontcysyllte aqueduct built by Thomas Telford to carry the Llangollen branch of the Shropshire Union Canal. Completed in 1805, it is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain, a Grade I-listed building and a World Heritage Site. But don’t muse on the idyll for too long because round the curve is an almighty slap in the face from the giant Krononspan MDF works, the third-largest in the world, a smoking and fuming vision of hell, spreading across a hundred acres amid mountains of wood pulp. But at least the logs for processing arrive in an ecologically sound way – by train from Eskdalemuir in Scotland.
    Serenity is restored as we pass the magnificent medieval fortress of Chirk Castle in the woods to the west, the last Edward I castle still lived in today, and emerge from a cutting onto Chirk Viaduct. This is a breathtaking sight, the line soaring over the river Ceiriog and the border into England on sixteen arches of honey -coloured stone. On the east side, almost touching it but a little lower, runs the canal on the matching masonry of Telford’s 1801 aqueduct. The water is contained in a vast iron trough, the plates for which were cast at nearby Ketley. This is a transport archaeologist’s paradise, since below is the trackbed of the little narrow-gauge Glyn Valley Tramway, built to carry slate across the valley. It closed in 1935, but now a group of enthusiasts are hoping to