Volume Twelve - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - further aspects - A History of Penarth Dock by Roy Thorne . . .

"Not content with being accommodated with a spacious datum terminus along a frontage of the deepest part of the port, the primary promoters of the railway wished to monopolise the whole western side of the New Float : and yet they offered so beggarly a sum in remuneration that the proffer could only be excused as an absurdity." [126]

In substance the offer made to Lord Bute meant that the railway company should lease the whole of the west side of the Bute Dock for £1,000 a year and that port dues should not exceed two pence a ton in and out. This would have given Lord Bute an average income of about £2,500 par year. Bute had spent almost £400,000 in cash and minerals of his own and he would have had only one and a quarter per cent on his outlay. This was not an economic return for such a capital investment and Bute rejected the offer.

The Merthyr Tydvil and Cardiff Railway Act, 1836 had given the T.V.R. authorisation to build a branch line from Radyr to the west bank of the Ely at Cogan Pill more than a furlong past Cogan Pill to Cwtch y Cwm. It appears that this branch line would have led to a channel.

The channel was to be a cut which would straighten the River Ely from a point below Cogan Pill House westwards to near where the Toll Gate Bridge later existed, and where there is now a modern bridge. The river Ely was later straightened at this stretch about 1970.

This channel is shown in Brunel's plans for "Merthyr Tydvil and Cardiff Railway Bill", (enacted 1836 as 6/7, William IV c.82), and appears to be the cut Capt. Smyth referred to as, "the Cogan Pil to the west of the estuaries formed by the rivers Taff and Ely," because powers had been given to construct the branch line to the west bank of the Ely past Cogan Pill, and this land belonged to the Marquess of Bute. It was contemplated that this channel would have benching on one side or two sides of the cut and that ten staithes would be provided on jetties.

The T.V.R. also planned, in 1836, an enclosed dock at Penarth. The plans were made by I. K. Brunei, but a Bill was never submitted to Parliament. In his letter of 24th October 1836 to the T.V.R. Directors, Brunei planned an enclosed dock with a basin in almost the same position under the northern slope of the town as the eventual cock was made, but the entrance was to be from the north-west at Cogan Pill and not like the entrance to the 1865 Penarth Dock from the east.