North Wales miscellany 1966 - 1977

    Our material on the Industrial Archaeology of Snowdonia and Anglesey is now published on a separate page of this website.  

    This page will include a miscellany of other topics relating to north-west Wales which do not fit in directly with the above.

    Firstly, the bus services in the area seem to have received very little attention from writers and historians compared to most other parts of the U.K. In the 1960s these were normally associated with the large operator Crosville Motor Services. However, one of the fascinating aspects of the slate-quarrying districts was the multiplicity of small private operators which co-existed alongside the nationalised concern. 

   I put together my sketchy notes of that period, together with a few photographs and snippets of information from such sources as "Buses Illustrated" magazine, in the file below. It is surely very incomplete, and I would welcome any further information, corrections, additions, sight of any photographs etc to enable a more comprehensive survey to be built up......      

     The history of the Dinorwic Slate Quarry Co and its railways and tramways has fascinated me since I first visited in 1966. After the company went into liquidation and the quarry closed in 1969, surviving records were deposited at the then Caernarvonshire County Record Office in Caernarvon.  We spent many happy hours there collating the new information, resulting in a two-part article in the "Railway Magazine" issues of August and September 1974, reproduced here......  

     A previous article describing our move of the Dinorwic 1848-built steam locomotive "Fire Queen" from the quarry to Penrhyn Castle Railway Museum is reproduced here.....  

   The "Fire Queen" was built by one Alfred Horlock at his engineering works in Northfleet, Kent. We also know that the then owner of Dinorwic Quarries, Thomas Assheton-Smith esq. was friendly with a Knightley Horlock, best known as a fox-hunting commentator and master of hounds under the pen-name "Scrutator", who was born in Wiltshire. So what, if any, was the connection between the two Horlocks?  Here we investigate the lives of both these men, but still cannot find any definite link between them......  

The Dinorwic Quarry Hospital

    This short article was written to commemorate the restoration and re-opening to the public of the former Dinorwic Quarry Hospital building........