Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Railways Volunteering

We've had a busy start to the year with YRP Heritage, running trips to the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railways in January, February and March!

In January our task was to start work on their winter track relay job, this year's section led onto the impressive Cei Mawr (said to be the largest dry stone structure in Europe!) We delivered the new composite sleepers to site, then removed and set aside the old rails and baseplates. Then the real heavy lifting began, loading up the life expired wooden sleepers to be taken away. We dismantled about 100m of track and left site ready for the railway to start removing the spent ballast.

In February we helped the Signalling team install new signalling cables in ducts for their resignalling project at Dinas on the Welsh Highland Railway, following on from a similar job we did there in November. We also helped the infrastructure team install rails at the relay site at Cei Mawr that we started work on in January. Finally we jacked up and packed a set of points at Minffordd to round out another good trip!

We were back at the Welsh Highland in March where we relaid two panels of track over the site of a landslip the railway suffered in a storm in December, the area of the landslip was already known as "Landslip" because of another landslip decades before!

We're running more volunteering weekends like this in the coming months, keep an eye out for the event listings. No previous experience required, just some enthusiasm to get your hands dirty in a national park!