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time they think of it sitting out there at Boston Lodge brooding and hatching spells.

I left myself, I seem to remember, at Paddington Station in peasoup satin. Boarding the Festiniog Railway Society’s special train, I twittered tactically: “I do hope that on this trip we’re not going to be huffed and puffed into premature mental decay by those dreadful Westinghouse compressors. Personally I feel, chaps, and hope you’re all with me here, that the vacuum brake shows a nicer British regard for aesthetic intangibles, hey? Compressors, the snorting creatures, are best left, like garlic and the right-hand rule of the road, to foreigners, don’t you find? ”

I had memorized this, simplifying it a bit, from the latest SRUBLUK* handout. It won for me a certain consideration. Somebody pinned on my lapel a Festiniog Railway badge showing a Fairlie loco head-on, ringed by the Garter and topped by Prince of Wales’ feathers. All talking at once, eager directors piled line-charts, illustrated folders, wings of chicken, publicity silver-prints and bottles of export ale into my lap. After nationalization, they chorused, the Festiniog Railway drooped, festered and decayed for eight years. In 1954 a moneyed enthusiast, aided by less moneyed enthusiasts, bought out the line and patched up engines and rolling stock. So far they had reopened three and a half miles for authorized passenger traffic, and they purposed to reopen the remaining ten some day.

One of the directors, a politely nurtured and sedentary person—he collects Picasso pots and carved auks’ eggs and is wild about Webern—had scarred palms. That, he laughed, was the sort of thing that did happen to the palms of week-end plate-layers. Lifting eight-yard-long steel rails at fifty lb. the yard and packing slate chippings under new sleepers left one feeling gay, important and slightly shredded.

At Wolverhampton Low Level we all got out and shinned up signal standards, stood on each others’ shoulders or hung by the heels from bridge girders. This was so we could take pictures of The City of Truro (102.3 miles an hour speed record on Plymouth mail run, 1904), a deep-bosomed beauty in black and orange which had been freed from York Railways Museum expressly to haul us the rest of the way to the Welsh border. Then we all climbed back. Life went on. Young men wearing the orange and Brunswick green tie of the Railway Correspondence and Travel Society sat intently at saloon windows, watched for quarter mile posts, clicked stop watches, entered speeds on pink forms. A man in an R.A.F. blazer who drank bottled bitter from his own stein, which was modelled on the Tower of Babel, came up to me and said “ When you go through Leighton Buzzard tunnel on the footplate you put a sheet over your head and crouch in a corner of the cab. So do the driver and fireman. The tunnel’s so small that the train only just fits. Even with a sheet over your head you choke with dust and fumes and are removed to Leighton Buzzard hospital in a pneumatic-tyred coma for artificial respiration.”

Over the rim of his stout a loco inspector with the face of a prelate said that once when Soldier Hill, greatest driver of them all, was scheduled to reach Paddington half an hour after pub closing time he made the Plymouth mail leap like a leopard on down gradients. He gave every signalman on the line high blood pressure, migraine and the vapours, and was taking his pint of wallop in the Load of Hay by quarter to ten. A week later Soldier Hill took a Wrong turning in a marshalling yard, ploughed through buffers, wrecked a hawker’s stable and killed the hawker’s pony in a street outside. To all this the orange and Brunswick green ties listened with open eyes and mouths.

And suddenly there we were at Minffordd, halted amid rhetorical mountains, with gleams afar of estuary and sea and clouds the colour of butter piling the sky. Over the big railway line ran the little Festiniog one. A row of dolls’ coaches awaited us, sunlight making the most of their new cream and green paint. They were hitched to one of the nicest and silliest engines anybody ever saw, an engine with two boilers, a driving cab in the middle and two chimneys, one at each end. The thing was obviously capable of staging a stiff tug of war with itself. The nameplate on her crupper said Taliesin. As soon as Taliesin saw us she whooped.

Then, genially swaying and bumbling, she hauled us up and down the three and a half rehabilitated miles between Portmadoc and Penrhyndeudraeth. All the hamlets had done themselves over with bunting and put on their Sunday suits. At level crossings there were respectful, handwaving knots. It was in all respects a journey worthy of a railway with a Corpse Car.

It had been my intention to write of many another rare Branch Line beloved of SRUBLUK—for that amiable society spreads its protecting wings over any little railway that is threatened by neglect and the slow grassing-over of its single tracks, its Halts and its inscrutable black sheds. But the Festiniog Railway and its Friends have a strange compulsion. Those who have once been drawn by Taliesin do not care to mention anything so common-or-garden as a railway of standard gauge or an engine that fails to meet itself in the middle. The Festiniog Railway is the queen of rarities.

Charles Reid