A journey marks the 60th anniversary of Dolgoch pulling the first passenger train on the newly reopened Talyllyn railway in 1951
On Saturday, a bright red tank engine called Dolgoch will pull a narrow-gauge passenger train from the Welsh coast at Tywyn up into the hills. The journey marks the 60th anniversary of Dolgoch pulling the first passenger train on the newly reopened Talyllyn railway in 1951. Run largely by volunteers, this was the world's first preserved railway, the start of a much loved and still growing global industry. Now lovingly restored, Dolgoch also headed the Talyllyn's very first train 145 years ago. This weekend's event, however, is also a celebration of those who made such enchanting journeys possible in an era of austerity when the preservation of an obscure and archaic railway in north Wales was, at best, an eccentric diversion from the need to build a modern postwar Britain. The driving force behind both the Talyllyn revival and the railway preservation movement was the engineer and writer Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt. From the age of 16, LTC – Tom – Rolt worked with steam ploughs and locomotives. With a quiet passion for narrow boats, he founded the Inland Waterways Association; he was also joint founder of the Vintage Sports Car Club. He was the acclaimed biographer of IK Brunel. His love of the countryside was captured in a collection of lyrical essays, The Clouded Mirror, published in 1955. An early environmentalist, Rolt did much to make enthusiasm for a gentler and slower world popular. And he proved that you and I, with a sufficient head of enthusiasm and steam, could even run a railway.