Taff Vale Railway

The Taff Vale Railway was a standard gauge railway in South Wales, built by the Taff Vale Railway Company to serve the iron and coal industries around Merthyr Tydfil and to connect them with the docks in Cardiff. The company was incorporated by the Taff Vale Railway Act 1836, which received royal assent on 21 June 1836, and the line opened in stages in 1840 and 1841. In its first years the expansion of coal mining brought branches into the Rhondda valleys and the Cynon Valley, and the export of coal came to dominate its traffic, congesting the Cardiff docks and the approach railway and encouraging competing companies to enter the trade. The company sponsored nominally independent branch companies such as the Aberdare Railway and the Cowbridge Railway, and from 1903 it used steam railway motor cars to encourage local passenger travel. From 1922 it became a constituent of the new Great Western Railway at the grouping of the railways. The decline of the coal and iron industries reduced its mainstay traffic, but passenger trains still run on most of its main line sections.