Railroads and Tramroads

The Clydach Railroad ran all the way down Clydach Gorge and was an edge rail system permitted by the 1793 Canal Act. It was first railroad to connect the upland coal and iron works with the Brecon & Abergavenny Canal at Gilwern. Completed by 1794, at least three years before the canal construction began, the tramroad was used to help finance the canal project by transporting iron to Glangrwyne Forge and supplying the Usk Valley coal and lime trade, and using lime from Black Rock Quarries and coal from the canal company’s Gelli Felen coal works. The latter was via a tramroad link from Pont Harri Isaac.

Reaching Brecon by 1800 the canal made this town an important coal-trading centre with tramroad links into Radnor and Herefordshire. Canal and feeder traffic increased greatly after 1812 when it was extended to Newport and the sea. At Gilwern the Clydach Railroad was provided with its own canal loading wharf, the original line to Glangrwyne passing under the waterway through an arched aqueduct.

The Clydach Railroad would transport heavy loads of Beaufort and Ebbw Vale cast iron and Black Rock limestone down the gorge carrying much Usk Valley timber and animal fodder for the return.  (Darren Ddu – Black Rock- Limestone quarries were connected by way of a tramroad spur.)    However heavy loading caused such edge-rail breakage it was soon converted into an L-shaped plateway.    

Rails were cast at Merthyr’s Penydarren Iron Works and possibly Pen y Cae iron works, Ebbw Vale. Not many examples survive although one was used at the Drum and Monkey public house as a fire bar for many years, and another is fixed to a wall near Gilwern wharf.

The canal and its feeder tramroads – without which it could not have operated – would be killed commercially by steam railways.   By 1864 trade had fallen almost to nothing and the Clydach Railroad was supplanted by the new Merthyr-Tredegar and Abergavenny Railway.    

Eifion Lloyd Davies and Peter Morgan Jones 

Follow the link below to see more detailed images of this railroad.

industrialgwent.co.uk

The Sirhowy Tramroad was a plateway built to convey the products of ironworks at Tredegar to Newport, South Wales. It opened in 1805 between Tredegar and Nine Mile Point, a location west of Risca, from where the Monmouthshire Canal Company operated a tramroad to Newport.

Boundary marker on the Sirhowy Tramroad bridge.
Photo courtesy of Andrew George

The Sirhowy Tramroad was at first operated by horse traction, but by 1860 the Sirhowy Railway was being constructed in order to modernise the tramroad. It followed a similar alignment but with several modifications, and opened in 1863. It ran  between Tredegar and Nine Mile Point. A short extension northward to Nantybwch,linking to the Merthyr, Tredegar and Abergavenny Railway, was opened shortly afterwards. The Sirhowy Railway was acquired by the London and North Western Railway, for which it formed a useful route to access Newport Docks.

The main traffic on the line was minerals: at first iron ore and later coal but with the decline of the traditional mineral industries and the loss of local general traffic, the line closed in 1960.