Porthmadog; Sunday, 01 May, 2011

Not quite such an early start to the day, but first stop was once again the railway station, this time to go in the opposite direction back up into the hills, but to the former slate mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog on probably the most famous of Wales’s little railways.

I caught the train all the way out to Blaenau taking in the spectacular line, which includes a section where the train spirals back over itself to climb up a particularly steep bit of hill (caused by the original part of the line being closed as it was to be submerged in a reservoir to create yet another pumped storage power station).

At Blaenau caught the shuttle bus up to the Slate caverns at Llechwedd and had a look around all the attractions there.

By the time I got back to the station I was just in time to catch the train, unfortunately there didn’t appear to be any train. The reason was that there was a large fire near the railway and the fire brigade had halted all trains.

At one point it looked like we would have to be bussed back to Blaenau, but eventually the final train of the day made it through to take us back, so instead of having a couple of hours exploring Snowdonia national park, instead I had two hours sitting on Blaenau Ffestiniog station.

By the time I got back into town all the restaurants were full so I had to grab a takeaway from the local Chinese and take it back to the hotel to eat.