Published in April 2020, Llanelly West to Carmarthen is the first volume of the West Wales Railways series from publishers Pen & Sword.

Written by former railwayman John Hodge, this hardback book measures around 285mm x 225mm, has 192 pages and 255 colour and black and white illustrations. It has a published price of £30, and at the time of writing it can be obtained online from Amazon for £14.70.

This book continues the author’s series of South Wales Main Line series from publisher Wild Swan. The author explains that the change of publisher is because Wild Swan only wanted steam age photographs to be included. Throughout the book, the author uses Llanelly’s original spelling ending with a ‘y’, rather than the current ending of an ‘i’, although the blurb on the front flyleaf refers to the book as Llanelli to Carmarthen.

This volume provides an in-depth description of the history of the main line section of the West Wales line from west of Llanelli to Carmarthen, including each station and location of interest. Although the author covered Llanelli itself in his previous volume for Wild Swan The South Wales Main Line Part Five Swansea to Llanelly, it seems a glaring omission that this book omits the Llanelli station environs completely.

An introduction with historic details of the locations traversed by the line is followed by a section that the author calls “Location Analysis” which provides a summary of each station’s history and infrastructure. A large and varied selection of photographs are included for each location, but Carmarthen, although being the main location on the line, seems to have an unduly large proportion of the total content with 92 of the book’s 192 pages.

A useful addition is the section on Carmarthen Shed that gives details of the shed’s allocation for each decade from 1904 through to its closure in 1964.

A glaring omission is the absence of maps, especially at the Llanelli end of the line where various independent railways and industrial locations are referenced.

Throughout the book, many of the black-and-white photographs suffer from a lack of contrast, which could have been corrected with a little editing.

Because of the short distance and lack of branch lines covered by the book, the author has chosen to expand its content with many standard three-quarter views of locomotives grouped by classes. As a result, the latter part of the book is more of an appreciation of various classes of ex-GWR steam locomotives rather than a discovery of features and operational details of the Llanelli to Carmarthen main line, such as the examples in the pages below.

As seen in the pages below, each page has a header with the book’s title, rather than being identified by the section title. The result is that in many cases the photograph captions make little sense without referring back to the section title.

According to the author, photographs of Kidwelly station are in short supply, so he has done well to source the ones shown here.

As noted earlier, the lack of a section title in the page headers means that some photograph captions make little sense without referring back to the section’s title. This is the case with the left page below where the caption states “The 16.30 Milford Haven to Swansea passes along the river wall…”, without identifying where exactly the river wall is.

As in the previous page, the upper left photo below states “9025 stands at Platform 3 awaiting her return to Aberystwyth”, but again no identification as to where platform 3 is.

In summary, this book lacks the vibrancy of the author’s later volumes in his West Wales Railways series. There are far too many photographs of stand-alone locomotives that do nothing to enhance the text, whilst a huge omission is the complete absence of maps. The limited coverage of the book is reflected in seemingly repetitive photographs.

The book is available to purchase from Amazon and from Pen & Sword.

We would like to thank Pen & Sword for providing RailAdvent with a copy of the book for review.