Small Is Beautiful The Golden Age of Steam Railways

For more than 100 years, steam trains drove Britain.

They carried freight from mines and quarries

and people between cities, towns and villages.

Then, after World War Two,

branch lines were closed and steam phased out.

Some people refused to accept it.

They joined together to rescue old steam engines and re-lay some of the redundant tracks.

We had scythes and bill hooks...

shovels and rakes, and, er...

we just slashed at anything that was in the way.

I had a couple of flatmates and they went up.

And when they came back they said, "Oh, it was awful!

"We had to stay in this hut in the middle of nowhere, under the mountains."

And I thought, "Hut, mountains! Yes, please!"

And some of these intrepid volunteers even filmed their exploits.

I started taking films to record the disappearing scene.

Cos, obviously, if you didn¹t take a film of it, it wouldn't be there next week.

As word of their work spread, they helped millions of people reconnect with a lost world

that had once touched everyone¹s life.

This is the story of how they did it,

how this motley band of railway visionaries gave Britain its second, golden age of steam.

TRAIN WHISTLES

CHATTERING VOICES

It¹s mid July in Tywyn, North Wales, home to the Talyllyn Railway -

the world¹s first railway owned and run by volunteers.

There is your ticket. That's the adult and that's your two children.

Thank you very much! Thank you.

It¹s going to be busy and a mile up the line, at Pendre,

the three engines rostered for the day are being prepared by some of those volunteers,

including trainee fireman Holly Parrott.

It¹s the fireman¹s job to make sure the engine has enough coal and water, and keep it clean.

Get up early in the morning and we start by cleaning the engine from the previous day.

Removing all the dirt, all the grass seeds, all the old oil.

Making it nice and clean for our visits today and our passengers.

During the week, Holly works in banking.

Volunteering on the Talyllyn is her holiday.

You could go abroad, but you just sit on the beach and do nothing. I'm achieving something.

I'm learning. I'm having a great time with great people.

It's the rawness of it, the back to basics.

Although it's quite technical on how it works,

it's been going for hundreds of years, over 100 years,

and it's still done on the same principle.

And, yeah, British engineering at its best, really.

They've got a life of their own.

They're rather like an animal, because you've got to do what they want you to do.

You can't just go. Er, she's a challenge every day.

Charlie Daniel has been around a bit longer than Holly.

I first came here, I think, in 1955, and started to work here.

And I've been here...

fairly regularly, you know, ever since.

And I was a fireman in 1958,

when I was only just about 14.

These days there are hundreds of volunteers on the Talyllyn,

but when Charlie first got involved there were just a few.

What fired their imagination was a passion to save something that they saw disappearing...

TRAIN WHISTLES

..the world of the narrow-gauge steam railway.

When we think of railways today, we think of the big passenger trains

that run on tracks four feet, eight and a half inches apart.

They are known as standard gauge.

But the tracks on the Talyllyn are less than half the width of the standard gauge.

It¹s called a narrow-gauge railway.

There used to be narrow-gauge railways working in industries right across Britain.

The Talyllyn was built in the middle of the 19th century to serve one of the hundreds of slate quarries

that once covered these remote hills in North Wales.

The North Wales slate quarries,

basically, put a roof on the world.

It was an industry, not of local proportions,

but of global proportions.

Each of them had internal railway systems sprawling, labyrinthine,

networks of narrow-gauge railways

with scores of little engines and thousands of wagons

at work day and night taking out the quarried slate.

They each had a narrow-gauge railway which ran to the local port,

where the slate was exported in ships.

One or two steam enthusiasts managed to capture the vast scale of these quarries and their railways on film.

We booked up first and had a guided tour.

We made a mistake there.

Cos we found out everybody else went over the fence and stayed all day.

We got rushed round the quarry by a guide who wanted to go home for his tea!

So that was a bit of a disadvantage.

We did have the advantage that he took us to places that you wouldn't have been able to go

and we actually went up one of the long rope-worked inclines on a man-riding car,

which was quite impressive.

Right up the top, you could look down into the quarry,

where it was so deep, people were just like little tiny pins.

And you could see these little tiny trains moving about.

As well as slate, a few of these narrow-gauge railways in North Wales carried passengers.

The Talyllyn was one of them.

It was built to serve a small quarry called Brynglas.

The line ran from a wharf at Tywyn on the coast.

It climbed for almost eight miles through delightful countryside that included a waterfall at Dolgoch.

There was a passenger terminus at the village of Abergonolwyn

and the quarry was a mile further up the line.

During the early years of the 20th century, output declined

and, by the 1940s, there was hardly any slate being brought down at all.

After the First World War, slate quarrying throughout Wales

went into decline, serious decline in some cases.

But the passenger service on the Talyllyn Railway carried on.

They served only a very thinly populated valley and small farming communities

and what was left of the slate quarrying trade, which didn't add up to much.

Both the line and Brynglas quarry had been bought by the local MP, Sir Henry Haydn Jones.

When he finally closed the quarry in 1947,

he kept the railway running,

but with lack of investment it quickly began to deteriorate.

Then Tom Rolt, a man already well known for his campaign to rescue Britain¹s canals

and an avid steam enthusiast, paid it a visit.

One of the things he found when he got to Wharf station

was a sign saying "No trains today".

So he wasn't able to actually go up the line by train.

But he did something which he regarded

as more useful for later purposes, which was, he ended up walking up the line.

And he walked up the line and said that he'd never seen an apparently working railway

in such appalling condition. It was more like walking up a country lane.

And so he wrote a letter to the Birmingham Post and he said,

"There's this lovely little railway in Wales.

"It's held together on a shoestring and we are going to lose it.

"Does anybody else feel like helping out and saving it?"

A meeting was held at a hotel in Birmingham,

and it was packed out, and everybody who turned up said,

"Yes, we would like to get involved in saving this little railway."

Tom Rolt chose his venue well.

North Wales was a popular holiday destination for people from the Birmingham area.

The outcome of that meeting was momentous.

Rolt and the others formed the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society, with a committee of 15.

When, in 1950, Sir Henry Haydn Jones died,

they resolved, with his widow, to save the Talyllyn.

For the first time anywhere in the world, a band of volunteers planned to run a passenger railway.

Tom Rolt¹s view of the Talyllyn was shaped by what was happening in post-war Britain.

In 1948, the Labour Government had nationalised the railways

and Rolt saw the Talyllyn as an alternative to what he believed to be increasing state control.

There was this idea, in a way, that this was a small enclave

from which to perhaps build and defend

and take on this grey-uniformed, state-driven world outside.

Most of the people involved came very much from middle-class, professional backgrounds.

I think one could call them probably highly conservative people in many ways.

They were very much people who disapproved, I think, of nationalisation of railways.

They saw this as producing a sort of grey uniformity.

And I think they disapproved of much of the post-war world - nationalisation,

the welfare state, greater equality.

Although, much later on, the Talyllyn Railway was described as a "workers' co-operative",

these were extremely conservative workers, to put it mildly.

Whatever their politics, they planned to open the railway in spring 1951.

But they were desperately short of hands-on volunteers.

One of the first to respond was a 22-year-old civil engineer, John Bate.

I had a week¹s holiday spare, cos I was working up at Sellafield, the nuclear plant.

And they had a shut-down week, so I had to go somewhere and came here.

And I enjoyed myself so much and I found so much needed doing,

and so few people with any engineering knowledge,

that I became part of the furniture, as it were.

John first came here in July 1951,

and he¹s been here off and on ever since,

including 31 years as chief engineer.

Right from the beginning he kept a diary of his work.

"Talyllyn. Dairy of Week.

"28/7/51. Saturday.

"Met Mr Rolt. Started work with McGuire and Geoff.

"Replaced two sleepers 200 yards north of Tywyn Pendre station.

"Worked 2.00 to 5.30pm."

It's all there.

"Monday. Bought a spirit level." HE LAUGHS

They hadn't got a level and the track was all over the place.

The track might have been all over the place,

but it didn¹t stop the volunteers from opening the world¹s first preserved railway,

on schedule, on May the 14th, 1951.

The track was buried in the grass.

There were sleepers here and there,

but really it was the turf that kept the rails in place.

And the joints were terrible.

Some rails were completely free at the joints and could wander up and down.

The carriages were not too bad, but the only locomotive was Dolgoch,

and it was in an advanced state of disrepair.

When the inspector looked at the railway in 1952,

he said, "Well, if it wasn't open, I wouldn't allow it to open.

"But as it's still running, I suppose it had better carry on."

It was in such an appalling condition.

When David Mitchell joined as a volunteer in the 1950s he was just 14 years old.

First of all, I tended to come on working parties, which were mainly winter.

And at Easter, particularly, we would spend our time digging ballast in the quarry.

Then we'd come down after school on Friday night.

I don't quite remember when I did my homework. Probably didn't!

In 1953, a serious amateur film-maker, an American called Carson Davidson, turned up

and wanted to make a film of the Talyllyn Railway.

TRAIN WHISTLES

It's a remarkable record of the railway as it was in 1953.

He was on one train where the loco actually derailed.

After all those years of Welsh weather, cross-ties decay,

spikes get looser, rails spread dangerously.

Finally, a wheel jumps the tracks and then...

METALLIC CLANGING

It's the only bit of the film that isn't properly exposed,

because he was obviously just looking out when it happened

and grabbed the camera and took it.

Derailed.

A long, exhilarating mountain walk ahead.

The gauge is supposed to be two feet three inches.

When it isn't, there's almost always trouble.

He was wandering around, shooting.

And if he saw something interesting, he shot it.

Perhaps like as you're doing now!

I appeared in it in one or two places, doing some wagon repairs.

That's John controlling the points.

They were putting wheels under some open carriage bodies

that had come from the Penrhyn Quarry Railway.

John is seen there taking the axle boxes off a slate wagon

and, again, a lovely bit of phraseology.

They also serve who only stand and bash things with a sledge hammer.

It's just charming. I can't think of a better word to sum it up.

It's something that shows the early days of railway preservation, the enthusiasm there.

This then is the Talyllyn Railway and its preservation society -

men who have found a challenge and take a special sort of joy in answering it.

They found a railway which was crumbling slowly into dust

and made it come alive again.

And it may just be that another generation will thank them for preserving the Talyllyn.

People did thank them and turned up in droves.

What the new railway offered was the opportunity for those with modest means

to get really involved with steam.

The only place to do that before 1951

had been the garden, if you were very rich, or in a club.

Max Sinclair was typical.

He got his "fix" of steam by being secretary of his local model engineers society.

In the 1950s, most cities had a model railway club,

open to anyone who could afford the modest membership fee.

People would take along engines they had built or just go to the open days for the thrill of a ride

on a miniature steam engine.

In 1955, Max filmed the opening of his club in Diglis Park in Worcester.

Having completed the construction, we decided to have an open day,

and we invited the Mayor, Rosa Radcliffe, to come along.

She was a jolly sort and she made all the little speeches.

The next thing, she lifted a leg and jumped on the train. We were amazed.

So we took her round the track.

I think from childhood I'd been a railway nutter.

I think it must be the thing that switches on all steam enthusiasts.

You take an inert thing like water

and you make a train go at 120 miles an hour!

Max¹s chance to get involved with bigger railways

began with a visit to another steam and home movie enthusiast,

his GP, Brian Rogers.

I went to see him because I had some problems with my wrist.

And he said, "What are you doing next weekend?"

I said, "Well, I'm putting a model railway round my garden."

He said, "Oh no, you're not. You're coming to Ffestiniog with us!"

The Ffestiniog Railway in the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales

was 40 miles north of the Talyllyn.

It was the world¹s first narrow-gauge steam railways.

It ran for 22 miles from the harbour at Porthmadog,

climbing 700 feet to the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Like the Talyllyn, it carried passengers as well as slate,

but numbers fell in the '30s.

Passenger traffic ended in 1939

and after a long and slow decline the railway closed in 1946.

For almost eight years nothing much happened,

until volunteers reopened it in 1954.

Max and Dr Rogers were amongst the first enthusiasts.

They found the railway abandoned.

They left their tools, their overalls,

everything hanging up in the workshops.

The job they were working on. Locomotives stored outside in the rain.

And then, of course, the growth started - brambles, grass.

And it was an invisible, green railway when we started.

Their films and photographs captured the state of dereliction on the line

and the spirit of the voluntary effort.

That was our First World War locomotive called a Simplex.

They were used in the trenches for moving ammunition.

Of course, at the end of the war, most of them were scrapped.

But one or two survived and we managed to acquire one for the railway.

And it was able to play an important job before we could get steam engines working.

We were a work party there, getting the station into some sort of order.

We planned to sleep inside the ticket office and waiting room,

but when we lit the fire in there, the moisture started coming out of the walls

and soon it was like a thick fog.

And Mrs Jones and Mr Jones, the station master, who had been there,

they were still living in the house.

They came round to see us and were absolutely horrified.

They said, "No way can you sleep in there!

"You can come through and sleep in our lounge."

Which we did. We all curled up in our sleeping bags in rows like sardines.

The basic living appealed to volunteers of all ages.

I read an article in a railway magazine,

saying they needed volunteers.

And with two other school friends - we were by then 14 -

we decided to come and work on the railway.

And we came up to Wales for two weeks and worked on the railway,

and I've been hooked on this railway ever since.

It seemed just like the Talyllyn, a derelict decrepit railway

and a band of volunteers ready to bring it back to life.

But there were differences.

Well, the Ffestiniog had a very different sort of structure from the Talyllyn.

Primarily, because there was a Ffestiniog Railway Company

and a society which involved voluntary enthusiasts.

And there was a fair amount of conflict between

those running the company, who would issue orders from a distance,

and some of the volunteers.

In 1955, Alan Garraway became the full-time, paid manager

employed by the company.

That¹s Alan driving the Simplex.

My father was a railwayman, at Cambridge.

And I used to go around with Dad

to the various depots that he was in charge of,

and I had got this in my blood and it just grew with me.

Alan had been a professional railwayman in the army and on British Rail.

He had a very distinct perspective.

He did not approve of rail enthusiasts.

He said, "We are enthusiastic railwaymen, not rail enthusiasts."

He ran a tight ship and expected those who were involved to get on and work.

And wasn't interested in time-wasters.

So he said to us, as 14 year olds, "Be here at nine o'clock in the morning."

And, er, you know, that's what he expected.

If we were late, he basically said, "Don't bother to come."

I think people used to think me a bit of a hard task master.

And I was, cos I believed that if a job has got to be done,

it has got to be done properly.

And I wasn't going to have people coming along

and running my engines just any old how.

We started off here in 1955,

with Prince, two coaches running a shuttle service across the Cob at Porthmadog.

Then in 1956, we got it running to two miles to Minffordd.

In 1957, we got three miles to Penrhyn.

It got more and more successful.

We had queues out of the booking office at Porthmadog every afternoon.

And this was our greatest trouble, was to carry the people who wanted to travel on the railway.

It was the same story here on the Talyllyn.

And in the summer of 1957, the trouble was about to get worse -

the BBC turned up.

That¹s the first time I've ever had to fish for a microphone.

But, surely, this is the right place to do it, alongside a lovely Welsh trout stream,

which comes tumbling down this gorge of Dolgoch right in the very heart of the Welsh mountains.

The corporation sent an outside broadcast unit and two of its biggest presenters,

Hugh Weldon and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, to present a programme live from the railway.

And, above us, the mountains...

The technology of time, of course, was very primitive.

The film, in places, isn't very good,

because, obviously, the reception came and went.

But 1957 must have been quite early for outside broadcasts,

particularly from somewhere in mid-Wales.

But luckily one of the members made a high-quality colour film of the making of the outside broadcast.

And there¹s one lovely bit where they'd taken the glass out of the spectacle plate of Number 4.

So Lord Northesk, who was president,

could sort of hold on with his hand through where the glass would be,

in order to be interviewed looking backwards by Hugh Weldon.

Tell me, are you always the fireman on this engine?

No, I share the job with about six or seven other members who've been passed as a fireman.

-You're a qualified fireman, are you?

-Yes, qualified fireman. We've learnt the job.

TRAIN WHISTLES

There is a sequence where they've got all these sheep at Abergynolwyn, which are clearly out of control!

Lord Northesk! Could I have a word with you down here?

HE LAUGHS

Come and join us a minute. There we are. One thing I wanted to ask you very much indeed...

In a way... Those sheep are all over the place!

In a way... It's rather impertinent, perhaps.

What I want to know is, how can you keep a society of this sort going

when the basis must really be, mustn't it, that everyone wants to be an engine driver?

There's really a job for everyone on this little line. They have something...

The technology might not have been great and the sheep and their minders a distraction,

but the programme itself did wonders for the Talyllyn.

DOGS BARKING

After the programme, our traffic virtually doubled overnight.

And panic. I was phoned up at work down in the London area by our engineering director, Bill Faulkner.

And he said, "We must build some more carriages quickly. What can you do?"

So I sat down there and sketched out a design in the office.

Went back to the digs in the evening and made a proper drawing.

Sent it to Bill the next day with a list of materials.

And about three weeks later, the materials arrived and we started building it.

Right there, on the pit.

While carriages were relatively easy to build, finding steam engines to pull them was a major headache.

As the popularity of both the Talyllyn and the Ffestiniog grew,

so did their need for more engines.

Up until the 1940s, industrial Britain had been awash with them.

Passenger trains ferried people about the country,

but narrow-gauge railways drove industry.

They had been everywhere.

It was the most cost effective and, indeed, the only way

of moving bulk loads of raw materials.

They could go round hills, over mountains,

through valleys and could be built fairly cheaply and effectively

in a short space of time.

Serving quarries, collieries, small factories

and taking produce down to the nearest port of conveyance.

In the English Midlands, they had been prolific,

helping dig out huge amounts of ironstone for the steel industry.

These little narrow-gauge steam engines,

they were the life blood, they were the beating heart, of the ironstone industry.

Without that, you would not have been able to expand the quarries

to the level of production which provided the income for huge towns, like Corby or Kettering.

We went to the Kettering Ironstone Furnace Railway.

It was a filthy day, pouring with rain.

But you got these trains appearing out of the mist.

There were two big engines working the main trains

and a little tiny Black Hawthorn saddle tank without a cab working the shunting.

And the chap on it had got a mac on and he was getting drenched.

And he told us that none of them had cabins on originally.

But the company decided that staff deserved protection and they put cabs on.

But the man who drove the little shunting engine at that time was a big he-man

and he wasn't having a sissy cab on his locomotive.

And he said the rest of us have cursed him ever since.

We filmed the train coming in from the iron-ore fields.

They had a steelworks there in the old days, but as the industry declined

the steelworks had been demolished and removed,

and they just tipped the iron ore into British Railway wagons

to go off to places like Scunthorpe.

Then, in the 1950s, after almost 100 years working at the heart of industry,

steam began to disappear.

As roads got better and lorries became bigger and more efficient,

narrow-gauge railways were phased out. Britain was modernising.

Factories, quarries, collieries and other industrial concerns

that had private, internal railway systems

were closing them down because they found that road transport

provides the more cost-effective alternative.

As a result,

thousands of locomotives,

wagons and rolling stock became redundant.

Most were cut up or scrapped.

They might have gone forever but for the efforts of two steam enthusiasts,

who in the early 1960s championed the cause of narrow gauge.

One was a rector from a parish in Leicestershire,

the other was one of the Ffestiniog volunteers, Max Sinclair.

I didn't like to see anything being destroyed.

And I felt that if somebody designed and built a beautiful locomotive,

I don't think we have a right to just chop it up.

And so, when the opportunity came to save a railway engine,

I went, wholeheartedly, into the project.

His opportunity came in February 1959.

I found this little Kerr Stuart on a farm not very far from here.

So one Sunday morning, I went out and found the farmer, Mr Beard,

and asked him about his engine.

And he said, "Oh, we've got one somewhere, but it's under that pile of old apple trees we've grubbed up."

I went round and couldn't believe it. There was a mountain of timber.

Eventually, we found Brockamin

with its funnel off and the water tank off.

But we could see that it was, it was a restorable engine.

And he said, "Well, if you promise to restore it, to not break it up, you can have it."

It was a Kerr Stuart "Wren" and, with a friend, we started restoring it.

Trying to restore it, we found we hadn't any spares.

Max needed to research railway archives.

Going through the railway books, we found people who'd got Kerr Stuart locos -

industrial companies.

And my wife and I would write to these people

saying we were looking for spares for our engine.

And the responses came back, "Well, we haven't got many spares, but we've got three locomotives."

Discovering Brockamin set Max off on a quest

that led to him restoring no less than 13 narrow-gauge engines,

all of which he gave away.

One of the first he came across was another Kerr Stuart engine

rusting away in a quarry in Devon.

It was called Peter Pan.

These days it¹s kept at the narrow-gauge railway in Leighton Buzzard

by its current owner Graham Morris.

It was built in 1922.

They built a lot of these. Nearly 170 of them.

That was unusual because, in those days,

people used to go to a railway engine manufacturer and order an engine.

They were largely built specially, one-offs.

These were built in bulk for stock.

It's also very small. It's only about four tonne.

And that was specifically to run on temporary railways.

Max, he saved lots of these little engines.

And he never intended really any credit for it.

And he didn't intend to keep any. In fact, he didn't keep any.

All he wanted to do was to stop the scrap man getting them.

Having done so, he'd write letters to people he thought might like the engines,

to try and find good homes for them.

Max Sinclair might not have expected any credit for saving so many engines but Graham had other ideas.

In 2009, together with others from the Leighton Buzzard,

he presented a painting done by the renowned railway artist Jonathan Clay to Max.

It depicted seven of the 13 engines he had rescued.

There weren't many people in those days doing this sort of thing.

It was very rare. Times were changing fast. People wanted to get rid of the old stuff.

Nobody recognised its importance.

There were other folk, but there weren't many.

One of the few who did recognise the importance of steam

and the need to spread the gospel of narrow-gauge engines

was a home movie enthusiast and Rector of Cadeby,

a small parish in Leicestershire, the Reverend Teddy Boston.

He was plump, jolly.

Not your idea of a clergyman at all.

He was born in Solihull.

He had a model railway in his bedroom that went up to the ceiling.

You know, up and down again.

Because his family were all into horses and this was the complete opposite to horses.

And then they moved to Cambridge.

And he went to Cambridge University, to Jesus College, Cambridge.

And he formed the railway group there.

And he had a model railway in his own garden and he pursued railways and steam whenever he could.

By the time Teddy Boston died in 1986,

his model railway had grown to be one of the biggest in the country.

Today, it¹s looked after by two of his friends, Brian Gillespie and Peter Vernon.

OK, send the fruit next, Brian, can you, please?

Brian remembers the moment in 1962 when the Reverend Boston moved on from model railways

to rescue a narrow-gauge steam engine called Pixie.

Pixie is an 040 Bagnell.

Built in 1919, for the War Department, to go to the trenches,

but peace was declared and it never went.

It ended up at one of the iron-ore companies at Cranford.

Then Teddy used to see it on various visits to his parents at Cambridge.

As in most of the Britain¹s mines and quarries, steam was being phased out. Pixie was standing idle.

And he went and sort of knocked on the door. "Is Pixie for sale?"

When they realised he wanted it to run it, not to scrap it, they said, "You can have it!"

Teddy¹s plan was to run the engine round rails he would have to lay

in the three-quarter acre garden, the rectory garden.

To buy a narrow-gauge locomotive and put it in your garden

was, sort of, unheard of.

And then we started laying track,

which... Half a day with a jim crow, which is the item used to bend rail,

and a packing shovel, which pushes the ballast under the sleepers,

you learn far more in that than reading all the manuals.

Teddy says, "Let's see if we can get steam up."

So we just lit the fire and then it was, "Anybody want a ride?"

And that was the start of the Cadeby Light Railway.

Brian was there from the outset.

The railway opened to the public in 1963 and people flocked to it.

We used to run the train till about five, half past five.

Then we'd put Pixie away, eat fish and chips,

and then we would have a film show, one of Teddy's film shows,

which would go on till about one, two o'clock in the morning.

I think the proximity of the graveyard always added a bit of atmosphere to Cadeby.

Some people didn't like it, but on a foggy night, it was pretty good.

One night, they'd dug an open grave ready for somebody to be buried.

And I was backing my car out the drive in the fog.

And as the lights came round, it suddenly picked up somebody climbing out the grave.

It was the church warden, who'd put a ladder in there to check it was OK and hadn't got water in it.

-HE LAUGHS

-Wish I'd had a camera then!

With help from lots of volunteers like Peter, Brian and Audrey,

Teddy opened the rectory to the public every month.

The Cadeby Light Railway drew thousands of people into the world of narrow gauge.

Alongside Pixie, Teddy had other steam locomotives,

a miniature railway, a steam roller and a traction engine.

And, after May 1974, a wife!

The wedding was a day to remember for everyone, not only for the bride and groom!

The day began with a steam-driven lorry ferrying the bride-to-be to the ceremony.

Admission to the church was by ticket only.

It was relayed outside by loudspeakers, cos there were so many people, couldn't get them all in.

Came out of church and all these hundreds of people were there

and photographs, et cetera.

But we didn't realise that all the steam boys had been beavering away while we were in church.

And we walked through an archway of shovels.

Crowds cheered the bride and groom as they left the church

in a steam cavalcade that included Teddy¹s own traction engine and steam road roller.

The day ended with a party, a real Boston tea party, in the village hall.

Teddy actually wore shoes for the first time in his life then, I think,

cos he was always in sandals.

When he died and he was buried, I had the shoes...

I asked the undertaker to put the shoes in the coffin,

cos I wanted him to arrive duly shod.

Audrey carried on the work of spreading Teddy¹s message long after he died.

Today, Pixie no longer runs around the rectory.

She is being restored.

Meanwhile, she and Teddy are commemorated in the Cadeby village sign.

Well, Audrey contacted me to say that the sign needs a little bit of TLC.

And it had been up for 12 years.

But it's cleaned up quite nicely.

But...as you see,

Basically, this is all relief carved.

We glue together planks of oak.

So, as you can see, it's got a little bit of depth to it.

So even if, in 100 years' time, this paint had all gone,

hopefully, the carving would still be there.

..Two, three.

OK?

The sign that Audrey commissioned does more than just commemorate

Teddy¹s contribution to steam preservation.

It also captures the place that steam still has in many people¹s hearts.

I think people have always loved steam engines and when they began to disappear off the railways,

with the dieselation of the late '50s and '60s,

people thought, "Hang on! We love these. We don't want to see them go!"

They were like living, breathing creatures.

They took people to work. They took them to the seaside.

They took them people on days out, before people could afford to buy a car.

They were part of an age in which people grew up and people identified with it.

And they wanted to keep a little part of that.

The place where people could really identify with steam was North Wales,

where preservation was going from strength to strength.

By 1965, volunteers on the Ffestiniog had managed to restore more than 10 miles of track

and were halfway to their destination.

Now, they faced a huge barrier.

The problem was that while the line had been derelict,

the electric authority came.

It built a reservoir across the tracks, the Tanygrisiau, which blocked the line.

And the reason this was a big problem was that the railway, originally,

had a gradient between Ffestiniog and Tan-y-Bwlch.

And this reservoir was higher than the railway.

And the company didn't want to steepen the line, because if they steepened the line,

the engines couldn't pull the same trains.

So to solve that problem, we did some surveys

and came up with the idea that you could build a loop.

By building a loop, a spiral...

it was possible to increase the length of the line and maintain the gradient,

go round the lake and tie back into the original line.

And so that was the project that was eventually adopted and it became known as the Deviation.

Gerald Fox was a volunteer at the time.

This model shows the problem, and solution, he came up with.

Trains heading for Blaenau Ffestiniog began on the old line on the left of the model,

but would deviate to the right to go round in a big loop.

It would make the line longer but the gradient or slope would be more gentle

and therefore easier for trains to climb.

The only problem they had was actually building it.

The Deviation would be a huge engineering task,

including a cutting, an embankment, a bridge and finally a tunnel through solid granite.

It was something that had never before been attempted by volunteers anywhere.

Inevitably, not everyone on the railway was happy about the plan.

They were a bit awkward at times,

cos they had no idea and they didn't interact with the railway very well.

That was the trouble.

They had to come into Tan-y-Bwlch station with their wagons and one thing and another.

And there was friction.

So we agreed

that if the project was going to go ahead,

we'd recruit labour from outside the established source of volunteers.

So what we sought were digging enthusiasts -

people who wanted a weekend in Wales doing something physical

that would get them out of their offices.

And we set up a rota.

The big problem was where do people stay, how do you live up here? How can we make this work?

And I was walking down the line one day

and came past Plas manor.

And there was this guy outside, so I went to talk to him.

And he turned out to be a retired colonel from the British army.

And he said, "Well, you can have my cowshed."

And he became a strong enthusiastic supporter of the project,

actually, a vital component because he had an explosives licence.

And to dig rock you have to blast it.

EXPLOSION RUMBLES

We built a siding for him, so that he could keep his locomotive up there.

And that allowed him to go down to Tan-y-Bwlch where his car was kept

and move his furniture and whatever, instead of carrying it up the hill.

Gerald and other deviationists, still old friends, are returning to celebrate a birthday.

I had a couple of flatmates who went up.

When they came back, they said, "Oh, it was awful! You had to stay in this hut

"in the middle of nowhere under the mountains."

And I thought, "Hut, mountains! Yes, please!

You know, so I volunteered next to go up and I really loved it. It was like a second home.

There was Bristol group, and that's the one I came up with, cos I was living in Bristol then.

-And there was a Northern group.

-That's the one I was involved in.

-BOTH: Two London groups.

-London A and London B.

It was a very mixed bag of people that you had.

People of different professions and... I was a teacher at the time.

I was training to be a chef. I was at college.

We had a mixed male and female workforce.

Probably, over the project, about 30% of the workforce was female.

And therefore you worked as a group, you ate as a group, you slept as a group.

And there was, basically, an unwritten rule

that there was no hanky-panky.

I'd just finished with a boyfriend. I was at a loose end.

And my friend Iain, that I was at college with, said,

"Why don't you and Karen come on the working party on the Deviation?"

He'd been involved in it for a number of years.

He was a railway enthusiast. And we said, "Well, we've nothing else to do. We'll go and have a bit of fun."

And this guy turned up with a car to give us a lift and it was David.

That¹s David on the left. He was organising volunteer working groups at the time.

Just as we were leaving to go out to the car,

my friend Karen said to me, "Oh, I like that guy with the big, fancy brown eyes!"

I went, "You can keep your eyes off him, cos I'm having him!"

I just happened to have a camera.

And this is the only film I've ever made with it!

I've been an engineer all my life, ever since I was 15.

My job at the time, as far as the railway was concerned,

was to organise the northern group.

We have here pictures of the Barn Site Cutting and the Rhoslyn Bridge.

These were taken round about 1969.

The idea of digging out the cutting was to break the rock into manageable pieces

and load them into skip wagons.

These were then pushed or gravitated down to the end of the embankment.

And then tipped over the end.

Occasionally, the wagon went with it,

especially if it had been frozen over night.

The wagon was loaded with probably about a tonne, tonne and a quarter, of broken rock

and was quite difficult to manhandle.

-You had to sort of stand on the chassis.

-Yes!

And one of you would release the sort of breaking mechanism.

And then you'd push it.

And the risk was, sometimes you felt the thing could over-balance and go down with the rocks.

My friend Karen and I, we were on the site just the other side trees here.

And there was about a three-foot diameter tree that needed to come down.

So the pair of us, between us, got the axe out and started to chop it.

And the men kept saying, "Would you like a hand with that?" We said, "No! It's our tree.

"We'll bring it down." And the sense of achievement was absolutely incredible.

But it wasn't all work.

I do remember people skinny-dipping in the lake. Do you remember that?

I can remember it. I never actually did it myself, no, but my husband has done it, evidently, yes.

But the fun part of the weekend was going home on the Sunday evening.

Because we used pack this flat wagon with all the rucksacks and boxes.

Sat on it, all there was between you and eternity was a brake.

-And you just had to hope that...

-And you whistled at all the places it said "whistle"!

-That's right!

And we used to go hurtling down. Really, really fast down the line, in all weathers.

I can remember one lad sat on a rucksack and he must have over-balanced.

And he fell down the embankment by Campbell's Platform,

and we had to slam the brake on quickly to go and retrieve him.

The volunteers were entitled to their fun.

They had been working on the Deviation since 1965.

Now, ten years in, they were about to confront their greatest obstacle,

a solid wall of granite, they¹d have to tunnel.

We were faced with this beautiful cutting we're in at the moment,

and a blank rock face and 271 metres of granite to get through.

Work on the tunnel started in September 1975,

and, for the next two years, hundreds of volunteers turned out every weekend.

Luckily, the project manager, Bob Le Marchant, and his colleagues Pete Hughes and Robin Daniel

knew what they were doing - they were mining engineers.

We drill about 40, 45 holes eight-foot long.

That might take as much as three or four hours.

Fill the majority of them up with explosives

and then that's blasted at the end of the day.

And when you come back next morning, you've got about 50 tonnes of broken rock ahead of you.

And you've got about maybe four or five or six hours of loading rock

before you can then start the drilling process all over again.

And it wasn¹t just the railway that benefited from their presence.

When the miners came to do the tunnel, Robin walked into my life.

And I thought, "Ooh, wow!"

-Big, bearded guy, you know.

-Yes, he was.

-Lovely sense of humour.

Erm, and I started falling for him.

And then, yeah, we gradually got together then.

But I was volunteering at the time. I used to sharpen up his drill steels.

LAUGHTER

Sue¹s drill-sharpening skills were clearly effective.

Robin and the others completed the tunnel in the summer of 1977.

Five years later, volunteers drove the first train into Blaenau Ffestiniog

150 years after the horse-drawn line had opened.

We met up with the other two guys the other day,

and we were saying amongst ourselves, of all the exciting things we'd done in life,

this is the most worthwhile, the most interesting thing that we've done and we're all very proud.

What they achieved was truly remarkable.

This disparate band of volunteers in Wales launched a movement that has spread throughout the world.

TRAIN WHISTLES

And the story of narrow-gauge preservation isn¹t finished.

Even today, small railways are opening in different parts of the country

and on the Talyllyn, the place where in 1951 it all began,

volunteers are at work still laying new track.

Back for last bit.

The narrow-gauge preservation movement just rolls on and on.

In the next programme, how volunteers took on the challenge

of restoring Britain¹s standard-gauge railways.

What you see with the station name board

is a group of us putting it back in its rightful place.

That was, if you like, reclaiming the railway for us.

And how one of Britain¹s most popular films

changed railway preservation forever.

This is actually the spot where I stood to flag off the train

in several sequences in the 1970 film.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd