Volume Eleven - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - some more aspects - The Taff Vale Railway and Docks - 'The Engineer' Article of 1866 . . .

The dock was opened last year, after many difficulties had been overcome in its construction, because the muddy character of the soil afforded no good foundation for the necessary masonry, which is consequently mostly built upon piles. The new dock is 2,100ft. long and 370ft. wide, and the basin 400ft. by 300ft. The lock is 270ft. long by 60ft. wide, and the sea entrance is also 60ft. in width, with a depth of water from 25ft. to 35ft., according to the height of the tides.

The branch from the Taff Vale Railway reaches the docks at a height of from 18ft. to 19ft. above the level of the edge of the dock, and the wagons are brought perpendicularly over the edge of the vessel about to receive the coals. The roads from the line incline to the drops, so that wagons run down by their own weight, and after being disburdened at the shoots are sent back by other roads, which also incline downwards.

There are twelve drops altogether, eight of them being calculated to ship 150 tons per hour, but four of them are double drops, each arranged to shoot coal into the same vessel at the rate of 300 tons per hour.

Mr. George Fisher, the engineer to the Taff Vale Railway, states that sometimes vessels have come in on one tide and gone out in twelve hours with 1,000 tons of coal on board. Not only is care taken to expedite the departure of ships, because tide a steamer saves is calculated by the freighters to be equal to threepence per ton on the coal, but care is taken to ship the coal in good condition.

For this purpose an anti-breakage machine is employed, consisting of a kind of bucket with a hinged bottom, which catches the coals as they fall from each shoot and then carries them down into the hold of the vessel. On reaching the lower part of the vessel the bottom of the bucket opens, and coals are deposited without breakage to themselves or injury to the ship.

In the ordinary way o work at the Penarth docks twenty wagons, of from six to ten tons each, are tipped in every hour at each shoot. At another part of the dock are three ballast and iron ore cranes and a ten-ton lifting crane, and these, with all the machinery connected with the docks, are worked by hydraulic engines.