Wrexham; Sunday, 30 June, 2019

Another early start and after a quick breakfast and checkout I once again headed to the bus station and once again picked up the number 5 bus towards Trevor, this time though I stayed on the bus and continued to the end of the route at Llangollen. This is a pretty town on the River Dee, at a point where it passes through some impressive rapids. It’s also now the starting point of the Llangollen Railway that runs alongside the River Dee for about 8 miles.

I purchased a day rover and joined the first steam train of the day out of the station heading West. I took the train the whole way to the current end of the line at Carrog (the line continues onto Corwen, but at the time of visiting the final section was having work done on it to extend the line into the centre of the town). After quite a bit of time at Carrog the train was ready to head back towards Llangollen so I hopped back on and made the journey back down the line.

At Llangollen I stopped in the station buffet for a quick lunch before heading out again on the next departure, this time just the one stop up the line to Berwyn. This small settlement is the point where the Llangollen canal, that I’d been on yesterday over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, starts. It’s fed from the River Dee using a man-made waterfall created in the shape of a horseshoe. From the station it was a short walk down the hill to river and then across it on a chainlink bridge, before walking the last 300 yards or so of the canal back to the falls.

I spent a little time at the falls before retracing my steps back to Berwyn station, arriving a couple of minutes ahead of the train back to Llangollen. Back in Llangollen I wandered into town with the aim of having a look around, but I very quickly stumbled across an open-top bus that was running tour sup to the Horseshoe Pass outside of town, so I naturally jumped on that to do the round tour, and was very glad I did as the views were impressive – even if by the time we reached the summit of the pass the T-shirt and shorts were proving to be a little bit underdressed.

The bus waited for about 20 minutes at the top of the pass before heading back down into Llangollen where it parked up right behind the bus to Wrexham that was just starting to board, so I was able to make a quick change.

Back in Wrexham I had a quick pit stop in a café to top up the caffeine levels before I headed back to the hotel to pick up my luggage and make my way back home.

As with the previous week work had brought me tickets for the journey to the conference, and I’d brought my own ticket onto Wrexham from Liverpool – which meant that I had to go back via Liverpool, which included changing in Chester on the way back. Thankfully, unlike the previous journey back from Wales the connections all worked well. In fact they worked so well, with the train from Chester pulling in on the facing platform from the London train that was preparing to depart, that I ended up on a London train a full hour ahead of the one I was actually intending on catching.