On this day in (engineering) history…
March 25, 1807 - The Swansea and Mumbles Railway, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, became the world's first passenger-carrying Railway.
March 25, 1807, a spring afternoon in Swansea, rapidly becoming the World's capital of the copper industry. The grey clouds are breaking into sunshine over a place called 'The Mount,' marked out by some small, low buildings near the centre of the industrial town. A group of men, women, and children climb and are helped into a strange contraption - a box mounted on wheels running on a plateway line. A horse will pull the box, not much more than a cart, on the World's first passenger railway journey, leaving the World's first recorded railway station.
The first in some ways, but not in others
The Mumbles Railway was not the first Railway - that honour belonged to a goods line in Leeds, the Middleton Railway, which started work in 1758. The carrying of passengers makes the Mumbles line unique, though its beginning was far from unique.
An 1804 Act of Parliament allowed for the laying of a line between Oystermouth (running just along the edge of Swansea Bay) and The Mount in the town centre. The new line would allow the movement of limestone from a quarry near the fishing village of Mumbles, with a branch line moving iron ore and coal from Clyne Valley – to the docks and canal at the mouth of the River Tawe, very close to the centre of town.
Left An Oystermouth Railway passenger wagon, 1870. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Elsewhere, another first
That same year, Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick teamed up with Samuel Homfray, owner of the Penydarren Ironworks in South Wales, to build and operate a steam-powered locomotive to haul iron between Penydarren and Merthyr Tydfil. The engine pulled a ten-ton load and 70 men over nearly ten miles of country.
The service continued for several weeks, but the loco's weight frequently snapped the brittle cast iron rail plates. There was no overcoming this problem and they eventually abandoned the project. At this point, nobody had thought about carrying fare-paying passengers by rail.
Back to Mumbles
After its completion in 1806, the Oystermouth Railway (its original name) began work immediately and without much in the way of ceremony.
The next year, one Benjamin French struck on the idea of moving people on the line. Passengers would pay two shillings (approximately £7 in 2025) to ride in a twelve-seat, horse-drawn carriage. French paid the Committee of the Company of Proprietors of the Oystermouth Railway or Tramroad Company £20 to avoid any tolls for a whole year.
In 1808, with two other investors, he upped his payment to £25 for an extra 12 months.
The Plateway to the World
The Oystermouth to Swansea carriage ran on a plateway, slightly different from a modern railway line in that the wagon ran on 'L' shaped rails. The flange was on the rail, not the wheel, which meant the wheel could run over paved or dirt roadways as well as the plateway.
The three-foot-long cast iron plates rested on stone blocks or sleepers. The three-foot-long plates gave way to six-foot-long wrought iron plates, which were themselves superceded by steel edge-rails, where the flange was on the wheel, not the rail.
Right Passengers sitting in a tramcar, Mumbles Railway, 1897
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Stone sleepers allowed the horse to pull the wagon without being impeded by the cross bars of wooden sleepers. This meant the plates would slowly move outward with use, widening the gauge, something wooden sleepers prevented.
Changes in circumstance
The line gave an excellent view of Swansea Bay, running close to the water's edge as it did. Until being away in a storm one night in 1815. Services resumed after the company re-laid the line slightly inland. But the construction of a turnpike (toll) road between Swansea and Mumbles put the brakes on passenger journeys at around the time the Stockton to Darlington railway began using locomotives to carry passengers (1826).
Competition from the new road saw demand for a railway line fall sharply, and the movement of passengers and goods all but stopped for thirty years. Only occasional loads used the line, and certainly no passengers.
Things took a turn for the better in 1855 when the company re-laid the Railway between the Strand in Swansea and collieries in Clyne Valley. Mail became another cargo in the 1860s. By 1869, the Oystermouth Railway was a success, with ten trains heading in either direction on weekdays - eleven on Saturdays and five on Sundays.
The first major change on the line was in locomotion. It became a steam-powered service in 1877 when an engine called 'The Pioneer' began pulling eighty passengers in two coach cars. Twelve years later, the (by now renamed) Swansea to Mumbles Railway was extended to Mumbles Head to carry materials used in the building of Mumbles Pier.
A hit
Now, it took an hour to make the six-mile journey from Swansea to Mumbles, travelling at 7 mph. The line became a major hit, carrying 48,000 passengers on August Bank Holiday, 1913, who would have felt the rocking and rolling motion of the carriages that line became famous for.
Steam on the Mumbles Railway (as everyone now called it) was swapped out for the new age when electrification arrived in 1929.
Charged times
The electrified service would run the largest tram coaches built in the UK, thirteen cream and brown painted double-deckers that could carry 106 passengers each, running in twos with over two hundred people on board. The beige colour scheme gave way to bright red.
Overhead cables carried the 6,600 volts of AC current from a dedicated power station to a substation at Blackpill, halfway along the line, which converted it into 650v AC. A journey that used to cover the six miles in an hour now took nineteen minutes.
During the 1930s, there were sixty trains in both directions, running six days a week and forty on Sundays. They carried 1,192,922 passengers in 1938 and nearly 5 million in 1945. The Mumbles Railway was now as much a part of the culture and identity of Swansea as Dylan Thomas, rugby union and cockles.
This, too, shall pass
By the late 1950s, the South Wales Transport bus company had taken over the Mumbles Railway. The journey's end was in sight, especially because the new owners felt the Railway was losing money and had little place in a road-based future.
They closed the section from Mumbles to the Pier on October 11, 1959, to build a new road. 14,000 signatures on a petition couldn't save the Mumbles Railway. On January 5, 1960, that last journey carried Swansea's great and good, driven by one Frank Dunkin from Mumbles to Swansea's Victoria Station (itself a casualty of the Beeching closures of 1963). Frank had worked on the line since 1907.
The old route is still visible along the seafront from Swansea to Mumbles Pier, while The Mount and Swansea Victoria stations have left no mark. Even 65 years after that last journey, the Mumbles Railway still makes itself felt. While the people who rode it as children are now elderly, it still pops up on postcards, paintings and articles about Swansea and its history.
Above A wrecked, vandalised Mumbles Railway tramcar at Middleton Scrapyard, Leeds, after a failed restoration attempt, 1967
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Share your thoughts
While technological progress is clearly a good thing, did we make a mistake in axing urban trams and cutting back the railways so radically?
How easy would it be to re-roll out railways in the future?
By Stephen Phillips - IET Content Producer, with passions for history, engineering, tech and the sciences.