Blaenau Ffestiniog is often referred to as both ‘the slate capital of Wales’ and ‘the town that roofed the world’, with three separate slate quarries commencing operations within a decade on the Allt-fawr mountain from 1819. The railway was built to replace the former method of horse and cart transport from the quarries to the River Dwyryd, where it would then be loaded onto river boats for onward travel to Porthmadog, where it would again be transferred onto seafaring vessels. The method was expensive in both time and quantity of broken slates, and thus in 1932 an Act of Parliament incorporated the Festiniog Railway company (with the Anglicised single F spelling). Responsibility for the survey and construction fell to Worcestershire-born James Spooner, who had surveyed the route between 1830 and 1831 and became manager following the opening of the line.
The continual downhill grade enabled loaded trucks, manned by brakemen to keep them in check, to roll freely all the way down to Porthmadog. Horses continued as the form of motive power to return the empties to the quarry summits, but as demand for slate and the traffic increased, steam took over from July 1863 in the form of Small England 0-4-0STTs Nos. 3 Mountaineer and 1 Princess.
Continued increase in demand led to an act being passed in 1869 that permitted the line to be double-tracked to improve capacity; this, however, would have been extremely expensive, not least because of the line negating some tight cliff edges and cuttings that would need to be widened. Thus, the double Fairlie locomotives were introduced from 1872.
Slate traffic began to decline in the early 20th century, hastened by the availability of new roofing materials, and a series of quarrymen strikes between 1900 and 1903 saw the slate industry decline rapidly. A hope for
