ften, the London and
North Western, with which it had long maintained a close working
alliance. But nothing ever matured in this direction. Cynics were apt
to suggest that the explanation might be sought in the parable of the two
dogs and the bone, neither of them really wanting it, but each anxious
that the other should not get it. Anyhow, it seemed as if the Cambrian
would become permanently established as the largest of the independent
Welsh Railways, when the Great War plunged, not only this country, but
more than half the civilized world into economic chaos. Emerging from
its war-time experience of State-control, the Cambrian, like other
railways, found itself faced with a hugely-augmented labour bill, to meet
which out of potential future revenue, appeared practically impossible.

It was under these embarrassing circumstances that Sir Eric Geddes, as
Minister of Transport, devised his grouping scheme, by which all English,
Welsh and Scottish railways are amalgamated in groups as a means to more
economical working. Together with all the other independent Welsh
Companies, the Cambrian was placed in the Western Group, with the Great
Western as absorber, and, the proposal meeting with the approval of the
proprietors, to whom the transfer offered, on the whole, a decided
financial advantage, while the directors were consoled for loss of office
with a grant of 7,000 pounds, it was merely left for the Amalgamation
Tribunal to give its final assent. This was done early in March and on
Lady Day, 1922, almost exactly seventy years after its original
inception, the Company, as a separate and independent organisation,
officially ceased to be.

III.

Such is the story of the Cambrian. If the reasonable limitations imposed
on the prolixity of authorship compel its reduction, in these pages, into
more or less broad outline, it is not for lack of plentiful material
available to the more meticulous student of its details, out of which, it
would be easy to weave a hundred volumes. Lying in the lumber cupboards
of solicitors' offices up and down Montgomeryshire, in the strong rooms
of Welsh border banks, or amongst the family archives of some of the
great country seats of Powysland, there are to be discovered by the
diligent searcher masses of old papers, the very existence of which may,
perhaps, have been half-forgotten by their present owners, but which waft
us back more than half-a-century, and shed varied light o