Welsh Railroad Follows Narrow Track With Double Fairlie : Transportation: Sensible companies gave up on the Victorian absurdity a century ago, but not the Festiniog Railway. It has just built another one.

The Fairlie patent double-bogie steam locomotive is a Victorian absurdity, a technological dead-end, a 30-ton metal mutant with smokestacks at both ends and a cab in the middle.

Sensible railroads gave up on it a century ago, but not the Festiniog Railway. It has just built another one.

“The Festiniog has been renowned since its earliest days as leading the field in narrow-gauge railway technology . . . and what we’re doing now in building new locomotives is just a continuation of that,” said Michael Hart, a director of the railroad.

The new Fairlie, christened David Lloyd George on April 16, gives the railway a stable of three. The first was built in 1879 and the second exactly a century later.

Whatever their technical limitations, the little “push-me, pull-you” engines are superbly efficient at pulling 11 pounds (about $16) from a tourist’s wallet for the 13-mile ride up the Dwyryd River Valley to Blaenau Ffestiniog on meandering rails that are just 23 1/2 inches apart.

(The town has two f’s but the railroad just one because the act of Parliament that established the railroad in 1832 spelled it Festiniog.)

About 300,000 people rode the line last year, and the railroad’s 60 employees make it the biggest industry in town. Because the railroad creates jobs in a depressed region, the European Community paid 45% of the $500,000 it cost to build the new locomotive.

David Lloyd George, named for the British prime minister who began his law career in Portmadoc, emerged from the railway’s shops last year and is surely the best Fairlie ever built.

Drawing on 100 years of technological advances, the Festiniog’s mechanics fitted the engine with a welded boiler, raised the pressure by 25% and added a superheater to get more oomph from the steam.

It all paid off. Merddin Emrys, a double Fairlie built in the railway’s shops in 1879, burns 11.5 gallons of recycled automobile oil per carriage per trip, but David Lloyd George will do the same work on 6.4 gallons.

The improvements, however, are all hidden.

“It would be awful if it was visible,” said Gordon Rushton, the line’s general manager.

“We saw pictures on the wall from 1879 and we said, ‘Wow, I would like to produce something like that.’ When you’ve got the opportunity of building, that’s what you do.”

That is a change of philosophy from 1979, when Festiniog’s Boston Lodge shops built the Earl of Merioneth as an unadorned, modern double Fairlie. The engine is now being back-dated with 19th-Century trim and phony rivet heads.

Some might call that faking, but Neil Clayton, a volunteer worker since 1963, said the distinction between new and old is fuzzy.

“You start off and you do some repair, and the repairs get more and more comprehensive--so when does a repair change to building something new?” he said one Saturday while directing a volunteer crew at Tan-y-Bwlch station, the midpoint of the line.

There’s no guesswork in building a new old engine. The cramped, chilly lofts at Boston Lodge are crammed with drawings and odd parts of locomotives, cars and signals.

“They had this terrific squirrel characteristic; they never threw anything away,” Rushton said. The railroad still has its first locomotive and the remains of its first passenger car.

The Festiniog Railway was built to haul slate from upland quarries to the quays at Portmadoc. It was closed in 1946 but revived by enthusiasts in 1955.

It claims to be the world’s second-oldest railroad still operating under its original name, incorporated shortly after the Strasburg Railway in Pennsylvania.

The Festiniog’s treasures include wooden patterns of smokestacks, cylinders and wheels.

“You don’t need to redesign those,” Rushton said. “You just take the pattern, clean it off and say, ‘Can I have two of those please?’ ”

He’s been told a locomotive boiler cannot be built anymore, but call it a pressure vessel with a heat exchanger and it’s no problem. Fuel and water tanks are subcontract jobs, but most of the work is done at Boston Lodge.

Scottish engineer Robert Fairlie demonstrated his first double engine, named Little Wonder, on the Festiniog in 1870.

The design was perfect for the Festiniog because both sets of drive wheels pivoted to get around tight corners, and the line has no way of turning a locomotive.

Fairlie double-bogie engines also worked in Russia, Mexico and the United States, but it was not a successful design.

“It has two problems,” Rushton said. “Driver and fireman can’t be together. The other problem is, why have two of everything? One boiler can supply steam to two sets of trucks.”

Efficiency is hardly a factor these days. What counts is steam: the chance to walk into a shop and inhale deeply of oil and paint, to touch a smokebox and find it still warm.

“If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. You can’t properly describe it to someone who hasn’t,” said Jill Franklin, whose tightly curled hair and overalls were stained with grease. She was painting Blanche, a 100-year-old engine, but is happier working as a fireman--one of half a dozen women who work the Festiniog engines.

David Black, the railway’s new works supervisor, finds his excitement in the harnessed power of a locomotive, something he learned to respect as a boy when he was allowed to drive a quarry engine.

“David Lloyd George has 200 pounds per square inch quivering inside that boiler,” he said. “That’s all power that can be transmitted to the wheels. But also, there is a great skill in handling the engines right.”

Black admits to a whiff of danger about the snorting monsters.

“Oh, yes, you have to respect them. But the balancing trick is what I enjoy, and what I try to put over to people who are learning.”