Swansea and its Stations

Tonight, for our last meeting before moving to a new venue in Hitchin, we welcomed back Chris Jones, who we thank for adapting the advertised presentation into this slightly shorter version to give us time to sort out the venue and give our members some Christmas treats during the break. Chris took us to “Swansea and its Stations” - apart from the stations we also visited many of the old coal mines in the valleys to the north of Swansea. In the period 1910 / 11 there were 485 mines in Wales, with 320 of them in Glamorgan, employing 41,000 men in just the Rhonda Valley producing 56.8 million tons of coal.

Chris’s photographs were very atmospheric, showing the area as it was in the late 1960’s, when, both many pits and the steam locos were coming to an end. We had a couple of short films during the evening showing the coal hoists lifting wagons and emptying the coal into a moored boat below. We went on quite an extensive tour of the immediate area just to the north of Swansea, travelling along several of the branch lines to various pits along with their small stations, signal boxes and in some cases engine sheds. At several vantage points Chris photographed some of the places we had just visited as they are today, now they are either under housing estates or covered in trees and shrubs, as nature just took hold.

As this was our last show in Hitchin before Christmas, Chris finished the evening with a shot of a pair of locos stuck in a deep snow drift!

Dave Elsdon
Branch Secretary