Making Tracks: Cynheidre

Jon Gower finds out about perhaps the oldest public railway in the world and meets a very enthusiastic collector of train cabs. 

The green undulations of the Carmarthenshire countryside is an unusual place to find a former London Underground carriage, a military railcar and a range of diesel engines but the Llanelli and Mynydd Mawr Railway is far from conventional.

Established in Cynheidre in 1999 it aims to celebrate and preserve both railway and mining heritage in an area where they were once hugely important. So you can enjoy a coffee in a cafe converted from a single car Super Sprinter Unit, donated by Transport for Wales or learn to drive a train on a one-day course. 

The LMMR has a very long history, being perhaps the oldest public railway in Great Britain. The Carmarthenshire Tramroad was first created by an Act of Parliament in 1802, hauling coal the very next year.

The tramway, its traction power provided by a pair of strong horses, allowed anthracite from the Llanelli hinterland to be hauled to the town and thence on to Llanelly Docks.

By 1844 the company had ceased trading and it was to take over 30 years for the line to reopen in 1883 as the Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr Railway Company which was absorbed in 1922 into the Great Western Railway and in turn by British Railways in 1947.

Throughout the twentieth century the line continued to distribute coal from the Gwendraeth Valley, until the closure of Cynheidre Colliery, one of the so-called “Super Pits” of west Wales in 1989.

On their Open Days the Llanelli and Mynydd Mawr Railway have all of their operational trains running over our short running line.

Mark Thomas, the current chair of the LMMR is also one of the drivers. His interest in trains goes way back. “My father, Des Thomas, was the founder of the heritage railway here. He built it with the help of several others over many years to the point where it is today, really. 

As we progress at a sedate, shunting speed, Mark points out places connected with the area’s coal mining heritage “If you look in the field just over there, there’s two pipes, sticking out from the ground. That’s where the original mine shafts were, they’re the ventilation.”

For Mark, driving along the half-mile length of track in Cynheidre is the train equivalent of a busman’s holiday. “I am a train driver in my job as well. I work all around the country with a company called Rail Adventure, involved in logistics such as moving trains from one place to another for customers like Transport for Wales.”

You can perhaps trace this all back to when Mark was very young. “My father used to take me as a boy to depots when I was like three, four years old, and I used to be allowed to drive the train.”

Mark’s father’s dream was to reopen the old Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr line all the way down to the sea, a dream the son shares.

“It has its challenges, mainly financial, but that is the aspiration still. I think it would be a great tourist attraction, but also an opportunity to get people from local communities from A to B. It’s a bit troublesome because you have got the cycleway right next to it. But we are hopeful we might be able to get some land alongside it potentially and work with Sustrans hopefully to extend further.”

Ticket seller Maria Val Loureda got involved with the LMMR eight year ago because she lives locally.

“I live in Cynheidre. And when the railway started to open up to the public, I popped over with the kids and I’ve never really looked back. So I work in the café and I’m the treasurer. Besides obviously the trains, we are passionate about maintaining the history of the mining community as well.

“The coal mining history of South Wales is so integral to the communities and to the spirit of the area. When the mine here closed, the community pretty much disintegrated. I think it’s really important for people to remember what was here.”

The village of Cynheidre has changed a great deal since the closure of the pit in 1989, as Maria explains. “There isn’t a shop, there isn’t anything here, there isn’t a centre for people to congregate, which I think is part of the problem.

And this is where I think we come into it and try to create a community hub for people to meet and to know their neighbours and so on. Part of what we’re doing is we’ve got a memorial being built to the miners who died here. There are 30 names that are going on there, people who died in accidents.”

Railway enthusiast Dave Dean had travelled by bus from Swansea to visit Cynheidre. His own interest in trains started in the 1960s when he used to go train spotting with his brother. “We lived in Surrey, near the railway, so we used to go and watch the trains go by. And that was the steam age.”

Dave is interested in the different liveries of trains and train companies, and has ranged far and wide to see and photograph good examples, with recent jaunts to Crewe and Llandovery.

This is Dave’s second visit to Cynheidre, so what’s brought him back? “It’s because they have special locomotives that come here. They’re like a holding place, they keep the trains for other companies. There’s one from Clacton which they’re painting and they’ve already finished one side. Soon it’ll be going back to the Essex coast.” Dave also enthuses about the Class 315 train – built by British Rail Engineering at their Carriage Works in York in the early 1980s.

“It has been there for a year or more. They’ve started work on it to make it look better.” That particular restoration project, codenamed “Yellow Submarine” involves a painstaking painting job to enliven the unit’s original First Great Eastern colours. 

There’s a queue forming for the train cab driving simulator where Richard Benyon is in charge.

His own interest in trains can be traced back to his childhood. “I lived in Pontyclun and there was a railway yard in my village, Llantrisant Yard. And when I walked to school in the mornings in the late 1960s, I used to cross over the railway line and see the trains.

My friend who sat next to me, his dad was a train driver in the yard. So we regularly used to take the freight train, the coal train, up to Cwm Colliery. And my bedroom window happened to overlook the yard as well. So I was brought up looking at trains.”

Richard’s interest in trains developed over the years into a very specific delight in collecting train cabs, freely admitting it’s a very niche interest: “It’s bordering on odd. Back in 1987 or 88, I was away on a driving trip to see various railway depots, and we ended up one Sunday afternoon in a scrapyard called Vic Berry’s in Leicester. They were breaking trains up, hundreds of trains, and they had taken the driving cabs off, piled them in a great big pile, and I just fancied one to put in the garden.”

That first train cab cost four hundred pounds but also demonstrated the meaning of true love: “We’d only just got married and we’d saved up to buy a new three-piece suite. I wanted a train cab and my wife Nicky gave me the money intended for the three-piece suite to buy my first train cab.”

Since then Richard has become an avid collector: “I’ve got 33 train cabs at the moment in my collection. Some of them are here in Llanelli and I’ve got a storage yard in Bridgend and I’ve got a number of them there. I’ve got a few cabs that are lent out to other railways as well.”

He’s equipped one of them as a simulator, to mimic the experience of driving a train. “I bought this one, in fully working order from Eastleigh Railway Works five years ago as these class 442s were being scrapped because they were no longer required. And I had a very good friend of mine who was a scrap processor and he contacted me one day and said, would you like a plastic pig cab? It was this lovely unit that we have here. So this was an express which we repainted back to its original livery.” 

“It was called the pig because when it braked it sounded like a snorting pig apparently and because it’s a modern train they just assumed it was made of plastic. The Class 442 “Plastic Pig” was an express passenger train that ran from London Victoria to Gatwick Airport, then on down to Brighton.

“We had decided we wanted to take a cab to the great gathering of enthusiasts at the annual Rail Show in Derby and wanted to build a simulator. This one just fitted the bill. We spent three months converting all of the mechanical controls to digital which connect up through an interface to the rail simulator software. Basically, we’ve set it up to go from London Victoria to Croydon, a 15 -minute run.”

Driving a train is far from easy, as Richard avers: “It’s a complex task driving, really quite difficult, which I didn’t really realise until I started to try and drive this train simulator.”

Now that Richard has amassed so many train cabs has he finally stopped collecting?  “No, it is almost an illness. I haven’t stopped, but I’ve certainly slowed down. I started off just saving old train cabs from scrap yards, getting them from people who had them in their gardens and also from museums. The National Rail Museum donated me a cab. First Great Western donated a cab. London Transport donated one too.”

It’s an urge that has resulted in Richard becoming The Train Cab Guy, not just in terms of the UK but he’s also known throughout the world.

It’s a form of hyper-specialist collecting that probably makes him a very rare breed indeed. Richard concurs: “Certainly, yes. I don’t think anyone collects train cabs like I do.” It’s a confident statement that would be very hard to refute. 

Jon Gower is Transport for Wales’ writer-in-residence. He will be travelling the breadth and length of the country over the course of a year, reporting on his travels and gathering material for The Great Book of Wales, to be published by the H’mm Foundation in late 2026.