Academic literature on the topic 'South Wales Railway'

The South Wales Railway was opened between Chepstow in Monmouthshire and Neyland on the Milford Haven estuary between 1850 and 1856, and in combination with the electric telegraph and ancillary railways established a transport and communications network that exercised a profound impact on society and identity in south Wales. By the narrowing of distance through speed, this network brought many urban communities and their nearby districts closer together and was instrumental in transforming the selfimage and identity of south Wales. Conversely, while the network compressed distance, it also forced excluded communities into relative isolation and consequently divided south Wales.

This paper recounts some experiences on the Western Front of two men who had worked at the Ipswich Railway Workshops before the First World War. Lt. Colonel A. C. Fewtrell , who trained as a cadet engineer at Ipswich Railway Workshops, and was involved in the operations of a light railway unit on the Western Front presented a paper about his experiences to some graziers in New South Wales in 1920. Major S. H. Hancox had been in charge of the powerhouse at Ipswich Railway Workshops before enlisting and being sent to France where he worked on the construction of a section of the 60 cm gauge light railways during 1917. Hancox relates some of the horrific conditions he encountered through letters to his mother in Brisbane. In 1916, the British adopted the 60 cm gauge light railway system which was already being successfully used by both the Germans and the French. The British introduced the Hunslet 4-6-0T locomotives, many hundreds of other steam and early internal combustion locomotives as well as thousands of wagons providing a solution to maintaining the necessary supplies to the front lines. Following the end of the War, fifteen Hunslet locomotives built for use in France came to Queensland for use in the sugar industry. Hunslet Engine Company Works Number 1239, delivered to France in late 1916, was one of those Hunslet locomotives. We briefly follow the history of No.1239 after its delivery to Australia in 1920 and donation to the Queensland Museum in 2005.

SynopsisNational statistics for railway fatalities in England and Wales show a reduction of train crashes and a fluctuating level of deaths, of which an increasing proportion is from suicide. A closer examination of a two-year sample from the South of England revealed a large proportion of probable suicides and a small proportion of pure accidents. The remainder appeared to have medical, mainly psychiatric, contributions to their death, of which alcohol was an important factor in single young men. Rail suicides appear to be younger, the men less often married, the women more often married, and both sexes less often widowed than other suicides. They included more cases of major psychosis and neurosis, but fewer and less severe alcoholics. Characteristic patterns of this method of suicide are described with examples. Hypotheses to explain the choice of method suggest that it is not related to either volume of traffic, or residence in a rail-dense area or in an area with a high suicide rate, or the proximity of a psychiatric hospital.

Abstract There is a substantial research gap relating to the quality of drinking water in regional Australia and identifying possible improvements. In particular, the quality of water available in public places (washing and drinking), such as water bubblers installed in regional parks, schools, rest areas and railway stations, is poorly investigated. This paper discusses the primary and secondary water quality of eight water distribution networks in New South Wales (NSW) regional towns. An analysis of a large number of drinking water samples (more than 11,000) identified that maintaining microbial water quality and the required free chlorine level (>0.2 mg/L) are challenging issues for regional water distribution networks. Sixty-three per cent of the samples collected from the water outlets available in public places of a regional town showed free chlorine levels of <0.2 mg/L, and 30% of samples showed positive results for total coliform. All heavy metal levels of the samples were within the safe level. Water temperature was identified as the most problematic secondary water quality parameter in public water bubblers. Stainless steel was the common material used in bubblers where surface temperatures exceeded 50 °C during summer. This study identifies possible design and operational modifications to improve regional drinking water quality and make public water bubblers more usable.

This thesis considers the social, political and religious changes affecting south Wales in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods through a holistic study of the lives of the men employed by the Taft Vale Railway (TVR). Its importance derives from four novel features. At its core are the employees of an entire railway company, not just a single centre or grade, and it has been informed by a wide range of disciplines from anthropology to theology. It has provided a closely observed examination of east Glamorgan society over the period, and it is emphasised that religion and politics were inextricably entwined in much of Welsh society. A contribution is made to the ongoing debate on the nature of community and its usefulness as a concept, and from this a 'Network Community' is proposed as a concept or investigative tool for use by social historians. The management's treatment of its workforce and the control strategies employed by companies through paternalism, welfarism and discipline are analysed. The Taft Vale dispute of 1900 is set in the context of the company's industrial relations history, and Ammon Beasley, General Manager 1891-1917, is shown to have been of greater importance to labour history than has been recognised. The fault lines in the realms of religion and politics, their influence on the company and the communities it served, and the denominational involvement of the TVA workmen are investigated. It draws attention to the fact that religion still played a ubiquitous role in the mores and culture of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. In south Wales this was dramatically enhanced by the phenomenon of religious revival; that of 1904-05 is shown to have been facilitated by the technology of the period, including the Taft Vale Railway, but without much impact on the railwaymen.

Although in one sense this is a study in regional or local history, its findings have much wider implications which are of national significance. Britain gave to the world the Industrial Revolution and, as a corollary, the railway. Evidence which throws new light on the evolution of railways is therefore of high importance to historians and archaeologists of industry. Such evidence, it is suggested, is presented in this thesis. It relates mainly to the evolution of that most essential component of any railway, its track, and to the industrial archaeology of what was the leading iron-producing region of its day. From the 1790s into the 1840s South Wales and, in particular, the Heads of the Valleys was much the largest producer of iron in Britain. To feed the works with raw materials there was a major system of railroads and tramroads which, except perhaps for the North-eastern coalfield, was by far the most extensive in Britain and therefore in the world. Even the tramroads of Shropshire, though tight-packed, were much smaller in extent. As it turned out, the North-east had the greatest influence on the Railway Age, with South Wales not remaining in the vanguard of progress for long. However, it was in South Wales that the first all-iron edge rail was used, and South Wales developed the tramroad to its highest form. Here too, among the precursors of the Railway Age, elements of the public railway were forged. There are three components to the South Wales network. First, the feeders which ran from the limestone quarries of the northem outcrop to the furnaces can be followed for about 100km in total. Although a fair proportion of this distance is now buried by tarmacced roads, within the quarries themselves lie around 20km of traceable routes. Second, a quite different set of lines led to the furnaces from the coal and iron ore mines, which lay closer than the quarries to the ironworks; but if underground track were included their mileage would be huge. Third, the exit lines from the ironworks to the ports, canals and nearby markets (as far away as Kington and Hereford) add a further 190km. Another guide to the enormous mileage built comes from the 10,500 tons of rails cast at Ebbw Vale between 1808 and 1816. If these were 3ft plates of a fairly standard 45lb apiece, they would total nearly half a million, or enough to complete about 220km of tramroad. This from only one ironworks over a mere nine years. So rich an area can only be studied in detail bit by bit. This thesis is therefore restricted to the limestone feeders of the northern outcrop, which archaeologically are the most fruitful. Most of the exit lines have been obscured by later railways; the coal and iron ore feeders are either underground and inaccessible or, where on the surface, have often been tipped over by later workings or destroyed by land reclamation. The limestone quarry feeders therefore provide the best opportunity to record early railways in South Wales. Many of the quarries which supplied the works remain as they were abandoned nearly a century ago. These vast monuments cover an area in excess of 4.5 square kilometres. The importance of the archaeology of the quarrying industry has been established by English Heritage with the publication of a Step I report as part of the Monuments Protection Programme. But the future of the South Wales quarries is not assured. Many could be re-developed through the Interim Development Orders granted in 1947, at a time when they were regarded as eyesores with no particular relevance to our past. Owners of largely unproductive areas of moorland are constantly looking for ways of increasing income. Quarrying for roadstone offers a lucrative return, and provides some jobs in largely rural communities which, theoretically, stimulate local economies. In the relevant counties output, mostly for roadstone, grew from 1,343,000 tons in 1895 to 15,515,000 in 1974.3 It is this threat which in part prompted this study. Although a great deal of attention has been devoted to the history of railways in South Wales (as in the rest of Britain) after 1830, relatively little has been given to their evolution. While previous studies have established the outline - notably Macdermot, Marshall, Lee, Barrie, Clinker, Baxter, Rattenbury and Hughes - these were mainly related to identifying the subject or concentrated on existing lines and documentary sources. Limestone railways have been largely ignored (with the partial exception of Rattenbury and Hughes), and little industrial archaeological survey has hitherto been done. My work, then, breaks new ground. It is intended as a contribution not to business or economic history, but rather to industrial archaeology and the history of technology. As such it combines extensive fieldwork with a detailed study of the history of limestone feeders from documentary sources, some printed but mostly in the National Library of Wales, Gwent Record Office and similar repositories. The result throws a completely new light on the artefacts of early railways, and especially on their permanent way. This has allowed for the first time a provisional typology to be made, and improved our understanding of the influences at work.

Abstract Rhosllannerchrugog has been described as the largest village in Wales. Situated about six hundred feet up Rhiwabon mountain, it lies five miles south-west of Wrexham, in North-East Wales. According to the 1991 Census, it has a population of some 9,169 residents, 38.1 per cent of whom are Welsh-speaking. Like Rhymney, the village was at its peak of expansion in the nineteenth century, when people from both sides of Offa’s Dyke settled there to work in the coalmines. The railway and local brickworks also played their part in the town’s prosperity.

Early childhood embodied a pleasant mix of sand and sea - and ships. Home was the curiously named Borwick Rails, facing south across the beautiful Duddon Estuary in the extreme south of Cumberland. The house, which was a prominent sea-mark for ships, was situated only a few hundred yards from a wharf or quay, connected by a railway to an ironworks nearby with six blast furnaces. Behind the house was the Victorian town of Millom, created in mid-century as the result of the discovery of a large ore body of extremely high quality. Once mining had begun at Hodbarrow, an ironworks soon followed, and settlement at Millom grew rapidly, drawing workers from Cornwall and North Wales as well as from rural Cumberland....

Abstract This chapter addresses the sectors that migrant workers joined because most migration flows were organised within individual industrial sectors. Four sectors were especially important and will be the focus of this chapter. The first was iron and steel. South Wales had developed a dynamic iron and then steel industry and several continental ironmasters set up ‘forges à l’anglaise’ for which they were willing to hire Welsh puddlers or rollers, despite the high costs of such labour. The second major sector that shaped continental labour migration was machinery. British expertise in steam-powered machinery was unrivalled. The third major sector was textiles. William Cockerill set up a thriving woollen industry in Belgium, while thousands of lace workers from the East Midlands, especially from Nottinghamshire, went to northern France, especially to the Calais area. This craft-based, hand-worked industry shifted to factory production in the 1850s, but British input persisted until the 1870s. The fourth and final sector considered in this chapter is railways. British engineers and investors were instrumental in the early stages of European railway construction, in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. In other sectors, such as mining, some smaller-scale recruitment was also organised. This chapter addresses the diversity and specificities of labour migration flows. Such migration brought together workers from different regions and prompted settlement in an array of different areas.

Black Mozambicans consistently resisted the oppressive labour regime that used steam locomotives and the rail network to deliver them as indentured labourers to the South African mining industry. Some used the system to transport them to the best labour markets and then deserted to find other, better employment. The railways formed an integral part of a highly coercive system of industrial exploitation and, in that, differed from other historical situations where transport systems were used to further genocidal agendas. Yet, so deeply traumatic were the rail journeys to and from the mines that they became incorporated into the modern witchcraft beliefs of Africans which speak of trains without tracks and the recruitment of workers for forced labour in a zombie workforce. The scarring caused by the Night Trains is still with us, whether in songs, such as Stimela, or in witchcraft beliefs that reflect death through over-work at sub-subsistence wages.

Modern concrete silos and grain elevators are a persistent source of interest and fascination for architects, industrial archaeologists, painters, photographers, and artists. The legacy of the Australian examples of the early 1900s is appreciated primarily by a popular culture that allocates value to these structures on aesthetic grounds. Several aspects of construction history associated with this early modern form of civil engineering have been less explored. In the 1920s and 1930s, concrete grain elevator stations blossomed along the railway networks of the Australian Wheat Belts, marking with their vertical presence the landscapes of many rural towns in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The Australian reception of this industrial building type of American origin reflects the modern nation-building aspirations of State Governments of the early 1900s. The development of fast-tracked, self-climbing methods for constructing concrete silos, a technology also imported from America, illustrates the critical role of concrete in that effort of nation-building. The rural and urban proliferation of concrete silos in Australia also helped establish a confident local concrete industry that began thriving with automatic systems of movable formwork, mastering and ultimately transferring these construction methods to multi-storey buildings after WWII. Although there is an evident link between grain elevators and the historiographical propaganda of heroic modernism, that nexus should not induce to interpret old concrete silos as a vestige of modern aesthetics. As catalysts of technical and economic development in Australia, Australian wheat silos also bear important significance due to the international technology transfer and local repercussions of their fast-tracked concrete construction methods.