Volume Ten - Pre-Victorian to the present day - even more aspects - 1906 - A Visit to Penarth Dock. (Taff Vale Railway) . . .

The House of Lords subsequently reversed the Exchequer Chamber, and restored the original judgment ; and thus, after years of litigation, the right of the Taff Vale Railway to take a lease which Parliament had expressly empowered them to enter into was vindicated. A decision the other way would have set up a very funny state of things - funny, that is, to everybody but the Taff Vale Railway, who, while being bound to work and maintain the Penarth Dock, and pay a heavy guaranteed rental to its proprietors must have handed over the entire earnings to a third party, for that reason that the traffic dealt with was not shipped at a dock in Cardiff which was wholly incapable of accommodating it !

The Bute Docks now and again - in fact, whenever they are in Parliament - are cited as evidence of the great enterprise of the successive Lords of Bute. We do not hear quite so much of the enterprise of the original promoters of the Taff Vale Railway ; and yet it is hardly too much to say that to the latter, as much as to the former, is due the marvelous development of the South Wales coal-field, and the present position of the town of Cardiff. The Marquis of Bute has always been well served, and the present incumbent of the title would probably be the last to complain that the investments made by him and his predecessors have been unremunerative. The position might, nevertheless, have been largely different if the Taff Vale Railway had not abandoned the line to Cogan Pill, or if the promoters of the Penarth Dock and Railway (who wisely secured running powers over the whole of the Taff Vale system), had not leased their undertaking to the Taff Vale Railway, and had worked it themselves with the absolute freedom from control which they enjoyed.

Penarth Dock was opened, as stated, in 1865, and its trade grew by leaps and bounds from 373,630 tons in 1866 to 2,540,757, in 1889, when its great competitor, Barry, came into active being. Barry, like Penarth, was the outcome of a movement on the part of Colliery Proprietors desirous of supplementing by another dock the alleged inadequate accommodation provided by existing dock undertakings. Unfortunately, for Penarth, the freighters who shipped the bulk of their traffic there were promoters of Barry ; hence, the opening of the Barry Dock reduced the trade at Penarth by 60 per cent., and it was not until 1896 that it recovered the position of 1889. Since then it has handled a trade (chiefly exports, as the traffic dealt with is mainly coal), of over 4,000,000 tons, an unique figure it is believed for a dock of 26 acres all told, including a basin of three acres.