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Wales Break - Day 3: 4th April 2025


Day three in the South of Wales and the wife wanted to see Tenby.
Bold = Haulage, RED = Winner, any others are sightings.

Awake early again (that’s usual for us for work and life in general) and we decided that as we were going to catch a train early we would have food at McDonalds (living the high life eh?) for speed and it was on route to the station.
A thing about the Pembroke Dock, Milford Haven and Fishguard Harbour lines here: The train services are pretty poor. One every two hours on average. We decided to catch the early Tenby one.
1b58 Swansea to Tenby 197021 Winner [60m 56ch]

Tenby is a nice little town on the coast. Sadly on the day we went was rather wet and miserable. The wife wated to go out on of many boat trips out to view the seals etc. But she took one look at the choppy waters and decided against it. We managed to get down to the beach area and had the tide been out we could have made it to St. Catherine’s Island and Fort but alas the tide was coming. Did however make it round to the harbour and North Beach. We managed a couple of photos of Goscar Rock on the beach. The drizzle was starting to get to us. So we headed back up to the station.

You can see form the station building that Tenby was a busy tourist spot back in its heyday. Platform 1 has some substantial stone-built buildings but are not boarded up and the Pembroke Dock bound platform. All the stations signage has both the English and Welsh station name on them - Dinbych-y-pysgod. Platform 2 is the Carmarthen bound platform and whilst it has a cover there is little to shelter from the elements. The Canopies are the original cast iron ones. It appear there was also at some point in the past a platform 3 but is not completely overgrown. It is sad that the track was littered and the whole station was suffering from neglect.
2B60 Tenby to Carmarthen 197021

non winner [29m 65ch]
Despite having the Track Plans books and railway atlases galore I never realised that Carmarthen was a “dead end” type station. It felt rather strange walking to the front of the station then using a barrow crossing to get out of the station via Platform 1. Of course, on the way back to get our next train I could not resist taking a photo from track level of the units in the station.
One of the river Carmarthen station is a normal small town with the usual shops. We had decided to grab some food then head to Kidwelly and visit the castle. Off we went to locate a suitable food source. And we really struck lucky when we came across The Boars Head Hotel. The menu itself had some lovely things on it but as we were aiming for a certain train we went for the Carvery. What a good choice. The meats were tender and the veg was all good quality.
Back at the station we crossed over to platform 2 and catch our train.
1W22 Carmarthen to Swansea 197012, 197001 Non Winners [31m 58ch]
As you can tell the train info above we did not go to Kidwelly. The train left over 20 minutes late from Carmarthen and we decided to be cautious and go straight to Swansea. This proved to be a good choice as it arrived in to Swansea44 late. They were also announcing that they were organising buses and taxis for passengers west of Swansea as there was a major signalling fault west of Llanelli.
Back in Swansea we headed back to the hotel to drop off our bag and then go and get ean evening meal. We headed to a pb we had seen on our first day in Swansea - The Pump House. A few ciders and a nice meal before an early night.

Site Update: 10th May 2025
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