Volume One - Into the Victorian Age - The Taff Vale Railway (TVR) . . .

It is evidence of the extraordinary advance that was being made in railway engineering that such a speed should be attained in 1840, when in 1836 Parliament considered it necessary to insert in the Taff Vale Railway Act a clause that no train should travel at a greater speed than twelve miles an hour.

Step by step the system grew. In 1856 the Company secured an independent seaboard outlet by the leasing of the Penarth Dock and Harbour with the connecting railway lines which gave the Company a considerable mileage to the south-west. In the early stages the Taff Vale Railway had to meet difficulties inseparable from the building-up process. Traffic was slow to come in the volume necessary to provide dividends. The shares fell to a heavy discount rate. But the Welsh Steam Coalfield was extending and opening at a phenomenal rate. Eventually, the Taff Vale became the most profitable railway in the Kingdom, and the £100 Ordinary Stock reached £300.

Then came the greatest crisis of the Company’s career. The Barry Dock and Railway, authorised in 1884, was opened in 1889. The effect was twofold: firstly depriving the Taff Vale, both at its Docks and on its railways, of an immense volume of traffic: and secondly, in reducing the revenue on what was left by a heavy cutting of conveyance rates. The gross revenue of the Company in 1888, the year before the opening of Barry Dock, amounted to £884,462, and the dividend and bonus on the Ordinary Stock totalled 15 per cent. In 1890 the revenue was £713,753, and the Ordinary Dividend had fallen to 7½ per cent. Agitation amongst the shareholders was a natural result, and drastic changes were made in the personnel controlling the undertaking.

A new board was appointed. These gentlemen were faced with the problem of unusual difficulty. With a capital unchanged in amount, and with working costs which had gradually grown up proportionally to the old revenue, they started office with twenty per cent of that revenue non-existent.

The manner in which they solved the problem, how they found new sources of traffic, how thoroughly they attacked each item of working expenditure, is written half-year by half-year in the published accounts, and there is no instance in the annals of South Wales commerce of a more brilliant piece of continuous and successful work. . .