page_title: British narrow-gauge railways
section_title: The boom years: 1865–1900
hierarchical_section_title: British narrow-gauge railways / History / The boom years: 1865–1900
caption_attribution_description: English: Charles at Penrhyn Castle. Built by Hunslet in 1882 for the Penrhyn Quarry Railway, now in Penrhyn Castle Industrial Railway Museum. The PQR carried slate from Penrhyn Quarry to Porth Penrhyn. The quarry and castle were owned by the Pennant family. Two similar locomotives, Blanche and Linda, are now preserved on the Ffestiniog Railway. Both have been rebuilt and fitted with tenders.
context_page_description: There were more than a thousand British narrow-gauge railways ranging from large, historically significant common carriers to small, short-lived industrial railways. Many notable events in British railway history happened on narrow-gauge railways including the first use of steam locomotives, the first public railway and the first preserved railway.
context_section_description: The success of the Ffestiniog Railway triggered a boom in the construction of narrow-gauge railways, not just in Britain but around the world. In the United Kingdom, the centre of narrow gauge construction was North Wales. The mountains of the north held large quantities of slate and their narrow valleys and steep hillsides meant that the smaller narrow-gauge railways were cost effective. The major slate mining regions at Bethesda, Llanberis, Blaenau Ffestiniog and Corris all developed multiple railways to serve the quarries. Some of these lines, like the Ffestiniog Railway, the Corris Railway and the Talyllyn Railway were common carriers, while others like the Penrhyn Quarry Railway and the Padarn Railway were purely industrial lines.
  Outside Wales, other industries started to use narrow-gauge railways to move freight, notably ironstone, limestone, china clay, brick clay and metals. Many common carrier lines were built: all of the railways on the Isle of Man were narrow gauge – mostly 3 ft (914 mm) gauge. A number of railways were built to connect standard gauge railways with smaller towns, including the Southwold Railway, the Wolverton and Stony Stratford Tramway and the famous Lynton and Barnstaple Railway in Devon. These lines allowed communities that did not merit a full railway service to connect to the mainline network at low cost.
  The 1880s were the high point of British narrow-gauge railways as traffic on many of these lines reached its peak volume and new lines were built across the country.
  There were many narrow-gauge lines, as the 1904 Railway Clearing House Railway Atlas shows:
caption: Locomotive Charles of the Penrhyn Railway, seen preserved at Penrhyn Castle Museum
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