Rural ride

Heathery mountains, cascading rivers and castles that glower darkly over the rails: this Welsh railway journey promises a view like no other.

- Oliver Smith

One spring day in 1963, Dr Richard Beeching published a document on behalf of the British Transport Commission, entitled 'The Reshaping of British Railways'. Squirrelled at the back was Appendix II: Passenger Service, Line and Station Closures. Visit any of those railways in that appendix today, and you'll invariably find the same thing: quiet places that haven't known a passing train for decades.

The so-called 'Beeching Axe' is infamous for making a certain kind of railway line near-extinct — slow, wildly unprofitable, rural branches, the sort you might find lovingly depicted on tea towels and jigsaws. But in Beeching's appendix was one notable victim on which the axe didn't land: the railway between Craven Arms and Llanelli, and it survives as the Heart of Wales line.

All aboard