Port Talbot Railway & Docks Company

The Port Talbot Railway and Docks Company was a South Wales industrial railway and docks operator incorporated in 1894 to carry coal from the Maesteg coalfield inland to the new deep-water dock facilities at Port Talbot on Swansea Bay — part of the wave of South Wales coal export infrastructure investment that transformed the Welsh coast from Penarth to Port Talbot in the late Victorian era. The company's railway ran from Tonygroes Junction on the GWR South Wales main line inland through Pontrhydyfen and the Afan valley to Maesteg, handling the coal traffic that made Port Talbot one of the busiest coal export ports in Wales during the Edwardian era.

Like its neighbours the Barry Railway and the Rhymney Railway, the Port Talbot company was essentially a creation of the South Wales coal trade, existing primarily to move coal from pit to port as efficiently as possible. Its modest locomotive fleet of contractor-built tank engines handled the colliery traffic with the practical simplicity appropriate to an industrial railway whose commercial purpose was clear and unambiguous. At the 1923 Grouping the Port Talbot Railway and Docks Company was absorbed into the GWR, and Port Talbot Docks continue to operate today — now primarily serving the Port Talbot steelworks rather than the coal trade that created them.