South Wales Railway  The South Wales Railway () was a main line railway which opened in stages from 1850, connecting the Great Western Railway from Gloucester to South Wales. It was constructed on the broad gauge. An original aspiration was to reach Fishguard to engender an Irish ferry transit and transatlantic trade, but the latter did not materialise for many years, and never became an important sector of the business. Neyland was the western terminus of the line until 1906. When the company amalgamated with the Great Western Railway in 1863, the track was converted to narrow (standard) gauge in 1873. In 1922–1923, most of the independent Welsh railways were constituents of the new enlarged Great Western Railway, enabling rationalisation and benefits of scale. Nearly all of the original main line of the South Wales Railway remains in use at present (2020). The prospectus of the South Wales Railway was issued in the summer of 1844. It proposed a railway with capital of £2,500,000 to run from Standish, on the Cheltenham branch of the Great Western Railway where the Bristol and Gloucester line joins it. Over the River Severn at Hock Cliffe between Fretherne and Awre and then follow the coast to Chepstow, Newport, Cardiff, Bridgend, Aberavon, Neath, Swansea, Carmarthen and Fishguard, with a branch line from near Whitland to Pembroke Dock. The prospectus was published widely as a newspaper advertisement: Surveys have been made of the line of country best adapted for accommodating the extensive traffic of the great mineral basin of South Wales, and the important agricultural interests of that country, as well as the intercourse between the ports of Cork, Waterford, Wicklow, Limerick and Wexford, the inland and manufacturing districts of England and the metropolis. The line was to pass "within an easy distance of Monmouth" and west of Carmarthen, it was proposed "that the railway shall divide into two branches, one to the naval arsenal of Pembroke and the harbour of Milford Haven Waterway, and the other to Fishguard, whence a communication with the South of Ireland would be effected within six hours." Chief among the objectives of the line was communication with Ireland; the engineer was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The project was sponsored by the Great Western Railway and in February 1845 the GWR announced that they had promised £500,000 towards the formation of the Company. It was to be "a great national undertaking to connect the South of Ireland as well as South Wales with the Metropolis".