The Kerr Stuart That Never Was
Boyd’s history of the Talyllyn Railway was published back in 1988 when I was an impressionable eleven year old. I spent hours looking through the illustrations of a railway barely recognisable to the modern day Talyllyn. Like many others, much of my knowledge of the history of the Talyllyn Railway was gleaned from that book and as a result, myself and many others will have believed the tale of the original pair of locomotives struggling on for eighty five years with their increasingly dilapidated boilers made from ‘Low Moor Iron’ preserved by the mystical properties of Welsh mountain water. Whilst fellow Talyllyn people who’d known Boyd personally mention that all might not be as it seemed with all that he wrote, I was too young and naive to know any better. Fast forward to Boyd’s death in 2009, the following summer, I was enjoying a volunteering stint on the Talyllyn when our then Archivist, the late Don Newing (a fellow East Midlands based volunteer), walked past me carrying an arm f...
