Copyright Oggbashan December 2020
Edited January 2021
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
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As I got out of the ancient carriage at the terminus I had to wait while the excess steam from the even older engine, Gwaldys the Hiss, cleared.
Gwaldys had been old when the line opened and was now worn out. She leaked steam everywhere.
"Shit!" I said to myself. I could hear the sounds of Myfanwy being sung by the regulars outside The Miners' Rest. They sung that every Monday to Saturday evening immediately after closing time to salute the young buxom landlady called Myfanwy the Biceps. Originally someone had suggested calling her Myfanwy the Bosom but she had thrown him bodily out the door, so Myfanwy the Biceps was chosen as a more diplomatic name.
Their singing was passionate but not professional although some were members of the Miners' male voice choir. But the sounds of Myfanwy meant that the pub's doors were shut and I had been looking forward to a pint of Myfanwy's beer. As usual, Gwaldys the Hiss was late arriving. But the railway line was the only access to the village apart from a long and very bumpy cart track. The dependence on the village on the railway was the only thing that had saved the line from closure in this 1960s but if Gwaldys finally died? The line might be closed.
The line had been built to extract coal from a South Wales valley. In the 19th century a mine owner had been told there was coal in quantity in what was called, in Welsh, Blacktown. It wasn't a town, barely a village beside a fast flowing river that emerged from a cave half way up a cliff behind the town. The waterfall had been named St Cybi's spring and had supposedly been formed when St Cybi struck his staff on the cliff when a fellow saint complained the valley was dry. It was nonsense, of course. A geologist had established that the waterfall and stream had been running for about half a million years before St Cybi, but who cares?
What mattered was that the stream was black -- coloured with coal dust. The whole place was black, so black that in English it was called '******' town -- a word that cannot be used now. The water in which the inhabitants washed was black and therefore so were they.
The mine owner had financed the railway line and an open cast mine to extract the coal, using hydraulic jets powered by the stream. The town grew and became even blacker. But the mine was barely profitable and the mine owner had to compromise by having only one secondhand steam engine -- Gwaldys the Hiss, built in the 1870s.
Myfanwy was standing outside the public house door to acknowledge the singing. She does, every night the public house was open. Not only does she appreciate the singing but it also means that the customers leave together on time. She saw me approaching as the men began to disperse.
"Hello, Bill," she called. "Come in."
Some of the men turned round.
"I ought to be jealous of Bill the Banker," one said, "But I know he and Myfanwy are trying to save our town,"
"Bill? He's not." another exclaimed, "He's William the..."
He might have continued with a word rhyming with Banker but starting with a W, but others hushed him. I had to shake hands with a few, and acknowledge doffed hats. I'm not the squire. Welsh villages don't have squires but I live in the largest house, the former mineowner's, and have significant land around the town. But the respect is not for my status but because they know I'm trying to find a future for Blacktown. My money, large though it is compared with most of the inhabitants, is not enough on its own so I had been looking for financial backers in the City of London.
I have been working with Myfanwy, the owner of the largest business in Blacktown. Her father had been the mine manager when it closed down, having married Myfanwy's mother, the daughter of the pub's owners. Myfanwy had been their only child and she inherited the public house with its ten letting bedrooms and a social hall, when they died in their late fifties.
Myfanwy was now in her late 20s and a black-haired larger well-developed woman. She and I were acknowledged as girlfriend and boyfriend although there was nothing formal about it yet. Many of the town's younger men were jealous of me, not just for Myfanwy's looks and personality, but for her money. After me, a long way after me, she was the richest person in Blacktown.
I entered the pub and followed Myfanwy through to her private quarters behind the bar. She went back into the bar to pull me a pint of beer, her own brew. I put my briefcase on the table. Myfanwy sat down opposite me.
"Well, Bill? How did you get on?" She asked.
I took a long pull on the beer before I answered.
"I'm sorry, Myfanwy. It doesn't look good. I went to British Rail to ask about replacing Gwaldys the Hiss. Yes, they have an ex-GWR diesel railcar that could do the passenger services and a formerly experimental diesel loco they might allocate to the line BUT..."
I stopped to take some more of Myfanwy's beer. The taste of it reminded me that I was home, and that Myfanwy's beer was made with love -- for the whole community, not just for me.
"But?" She prompted.
"They are losing money, a lot of money, on the railway line. They would have closed it years ago but for pressure from the government and local Members of Parliament. Even if they sold the railcar and diesel loco to me, they would still be losing money. So they won't sell me any engines. What they want to do is to sell me the whole railway line."
"The whole railway line? If they are losing money, perhaps they would sell it cheaply?"
"No. That's the problem. If they closed the line they would sell the assets. Gwaldys the Hiss and the rolling stock were written off as scrap value years ago but it is the land. They could sell the station buildings for conversion to private houses -- four of them. That wouldn't be too much. But the line was originally double-tracked even if it hasn't been since the 1930s. The track bed is wide and in Blacktown they have 50 acres of mine sidings and twenty acres of sidings at the terminus in the big town. They want two million pounds for the assets."
"Two million pounds!" Myfanwy squeaked, "That's a fantastic amount."
"It is, and if we wanted to run the railway, even with more modern locos -- possibly another hundred thousand pounds, even with a lot of volunteer help, we'd be losing a hundred thousand pounds a year. Currently they lose a quarter of a million pounds a year on the line. And there is another problem. We wanted to develop the town and surrounding areas as a tourist destination. We were considering dry ski slopes on the slag heaps, water-skiing and yachting on the lake etc..."
"Yes, I know. You were going to ask your City friends about finance for that."
"And I did. But things went badly wrong. I was going to meet four of them in the big town today, Friday. They came down by car on Thursday night. But when they got up this morning? Two of their cars had been stolen and the other two had been broken into, the music systems stolen and attempts made to start them. One car? That might have been unfortunate. All four? That was too much. They reported the stolen cars and damaged ones to the Police station and found out that car theft was endemic.
What that means is, even if we had a railway line owned and operated by us as a heritage tourist line, they wouldn't recommend that any visitor leave his car in the big town. It would be unsafe."
"Assholes!" Myfanwy said.
"I shouldn't have been surprised and perhaps I should have warned my friends. The town is one of the most deprived areas in Wales...."
"Not as deprived as Blacktown," Myfanwy interrupted.
