Right down the line: Mapping a life lived on foot, ski and steam railway

March 12, 2024

Right down the line: Mapping a life lived on foot, ski and steam railway

Keith Theobald was 19 when he read the book Railway Adventure by Tom Rolt, the story of how a group of enthusiasts - including Tom himself - rescued the Talyllyn Railway from almost certain closure in the early 1950s. Keith was hooked. At the time, he was working as a draughtsman for a water board in Kent whilst waiting to get a place on a crash course to become a cartographic surveyor with the Ordnance Survey. When the call came, he had a few weeks to kill before training began - so where better to spend them than in Mid Wales!

"This was 1973 and the Talyllyn Railway was advertising in Railway Modeller magazine for volunteers to help upgrade the line between Abergynolwyn and Nant Gwernol so that it could take bogie passenger carriages," recalls Keith, who has lived in Bryncrug for nearly 20 years. "Until then, due to the sharp radius curves and multiple changes of gradient, this section of the line only carried four-wheel wagons containing slate from the quarry or supplies for Abergynolwyn Village. I was a young man and it seemed like a good idea. I came for two weeks, during which I helped to move thousands of tons of slate. It was great fun and I met people who are still friends to this day."

So began Keith's lifelong commitment to the world's first preserved railway, now one of Wales's top visitor attractions. He became a regular volunteer, travelling to Tywyn every other weekend from wherever he was in the country with his job - on several occasions from the Orkneys! In 1980, he was elected to the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Council and took on the role of outdoor foreman - which he still holds today - recruiting and organising outdoor volunteers. He became a director of Talyllyn Holdings and the Talyllyn Railway Company in 2001 and is currently chairman of the Narrow Gauge Railway Museum Trust, which runs the museum at Wharf Station.

"I recently retired as a director after 23 years, because we need people with a different skillset. But I can still work for the board - I just don't have 'director' on my business card anymore."

Coffee break at Wharf Café

Keith's enormous contribution to the continued success of the steam railway - which opened in 1865 to carry slate from Bryn Eglwys Quarry to the coast - includes introducing "outdoor weeks" in the 1980s to maximise the efficiency of voluntary work. "We started with one in mid-November, but that quickly increased to three, with additional ones in the spring and summer." The most recent outdoor week, last November, attracted nearly 50 people who between them spent 238 days re-laying 280m of rails and sleepers and lime-mortar pointing on Tŷ Mawr Bridge.

Keith has also used his professional skills to set up what he believes to be the only railway geographical information system (GIS). "It's a way of portraying data as a graphic image," he explains. "At its simplest level, it's an asset register: what the railway has, permanent way-wise; the location of all the nuts and bolts, changes of rail section, quarter-mile posts and so on. It's of great value because it saves a lot of time, and the possibilities of developing it further are endless."

The railway wasn't Keith's first taste of Mid Wales: at the age of just five, he climbed Cader Idris and, a couple of days later, Y Wyddfa with his father, "wearing a pac-a-mac and my school shoes; I can remember the pac-a-mac cutting into the back of my legs."

This spawned another of his great passions - hillwalking. In 1984, father and son journeyed to Nepal together, walking the original trail to Everest Base Camp used by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay en route to becoming the first mountaineers to conquer the summit in 1953. After his father died in 1987, Keith embarked on a mission to climb all the Munros (282) and Tops (226) across Scotland in his memory. "To reduce the time it would take, I spent some very long days out, starting before first light and often not returning to my accommodation until after dark," he recalls. He completed the mission in 2000.

Keith also caught the skiing bug, spending 30 years holidaying on the slopes of Europe and, later, Canada, where it was possible to get insurance for off-piste adventures including heli-skiing on the steep, open mountains and in the forests of British Columbia. "You need to be able to ski in deep snow that comes up to your waist," explains Keith. "A small helicopter takes a group of you to the top of a mountain, between 8,000 and 9,000 feet, and drops you off. You ski to the bottom - a descent of between 2,500 and 3,000 feet - and the helicopter picks you up again and takes you to the next peak. The average number of runs on a trip is six, but there was one day when I did 16!"

The risk of avalanche is ever-present, he stresses, which is why it's vital to follow the guide's instructions. "We saw avalanches and triggered some, but I was never involved in any dangerous incidents. However, the time came when my colleague and skiing friend Dave and I - we were known as the 'dangerous brothers' - decided to give it all up before we killed ourselves. But it was great fun. Scoring first tracks down Symphony Bowl on a powder day or cutting through a 'gladed' run, where the trees have been thinned out deliberately, is the stuff dreams are made of."

Heli-skiing on Pemberton Glacier, British Columbia

Keith managed to fit in his intrepid holidays around his demanding and equally physically challenging job with the Ordnance Survey.

"When I started in the early '70s, the work was very fast-moving, so all the surveyors - whether they were married or not - led a very peripatetic existence. In 1976, I was selected to join a small group of 15 surveyors revising 1:50,000 maps and carrying out a specification change on them at the same time. So I then travelled the length and breadth of the country and lived out of a suitcase for the next 17 years, going home to Margate in Kent, where I grew up, only periodically. I suppose I could be described as a bit of a loner, although I certainly don't hide myself away. But it's one reason I never married."

During this phase of his career, Keith spent nearly five years surveying the limits of tens of thousands of acres of forestry in Scotland - mostly on foot. "You could spend days in offices looking at planning applications, but you still wouldn't know if the lines on the map were the same as the limit of the trees in the real world. They could be several hundred metres short of the fence, for example. That's why it was better to do the work on foot. I often walked 25 to 30 miles a day. I've never been as fit, and it possibly explains why I needed a new hip in 2022!"

With the advance of technology, the nature of the work changed. Keith moved to Swansea to do "more vanilla" surveying in 2003, becoming a trainer to keep his colleagues abreast of changes in digital surveying techniques. Three years later he moved to Bryncrug, where he worked across Gwynedd, north Ceredigion and a small area of Powys until his retirement in 2021 at the age of 66.

"For the last ten years of my professional life, I carried out general survey duties and contract work for Land Registry," says Keith. "I started my career with theodolites, chains and tapes and precise draughting skills, and I finished it with a very accurate satellite receiver using three different constellations capable of measuring to an accuracy of +/-20cm in real time and a very sophisticated portable edit station. I feel very privileged to have had a career spanning nearly 48 years that took me right across the country - except for the Shetland Islands - and allowed me to work in so many disciplines and do a job I thoroughly enjoyed - even on very wet days!"

But it's the Talyllyn Railway that has been the enduring thread running through Keith's life, even extending to his most recent spate of overseas trips - to Australia, where Talyllyn's "twin" railway, the Puffing Billy, is situated in the Dandenong Hills just east of Melbourne. So far, Keith has made about 12 trips Down Under. On one six-week holiday, he "managed to do something railway-related every day. If I was married, it wouldn't have lasted long, would it?!"

Even after half a century, Keith's enthusiasm for the Talyllyn Railway remains undimmed. "I don't work there every day, but I pop in most days," he says. "I love the engineering behind it. I enjoy maintaining the track, the planning involved and recruiting volunteers. Over the years I've gained a wealth of knowledge and skills in permanent way work, both here and in Australia and I've enjoyed sharing that with the younger volunteers - for they are the future of the railway."

* The museum is looking for volunteers. If you have time to spare and you like "meeting and greeting" people, please contact Keith on 07778 000703.