You Don’t Stop Talking…

On Thursday 12 April I gave a guest lecture to members of the Irish Railway Record Society (IRRS) at Heuston Station, Dublin, about the architecture of the Great Northern Railway as demonstrated at Dundalk. This was followed by another hour of questions and discussion with the audience after a much-needed tea break!

Buildings featured included Dundalk Station, houses at Demesne Terrace, Ardee Terrace and Brook Street, as well as key buildings at the old engineering works: the boiler shop, works offices and goods stores. Each showcase the core architectural features used by the GNRI: black, red and yellow brick-accenting – I call it ‘brick-branding’ – arched and curved window frames and ocular pediments.

One very interesting development was following my suggestion using evidence from the IRRS archives that the original ‘old station’ at Dundalk was to the east of the Dublin-Belfast line. Ciaran Cooney followed this up with a digitised OS map in University College Dublin archives clearly showing the old station, its rooms and a footbridge connecting to the platform on the west side of the tracks. Mystery solved!

I am going to be giving this talk along with this new discovery for the Dundalk Railway Heritage Society at the County Museum,Dundalk on Thursday 24 May 2018 at 7pm.

In the words of Chas and Dave, more rabbit than Sainsbury’s!

Spinning at Balbriggan

Recovered from my rather cranky experience at Skerries , my eyes are rewarded and my heart gladdened on the approach to Balbriggan. Arriving from the south and entering the station over John Macneill’s viaduct, a neat, contained lump of a station reassures me as I alight. Designed by George Papworth for the Dublin and Drogheda Railway (DDR) and built in 1853, Balbriggan railway station is a single-storey H-plan brown brick affair, with flanking Romanesque arches. The current stairway from hell take me across the tracks and provide a sweeping view of the beach and harbour, as well as a stairway to heaven: the former piers for the original footbridge. The beats to Talking Head’s Road to Nowhere start bubbling in the back of my mind. Beside the station building and its adjoining flightless steps stands the hammered stone and red brick base of the former, seemingly unadaptable, water tower. A more sympathetic contemporary alteration in the form of glass sliding doors announce

Sweet Dreams at Navan

Upon my first visit to Navan in 2018 in search of the railway station I was astounded that such a large town could have had its train service removed, when much smaller villages along the Sligo and Maynooth routes were still connected to the capital. Little did I know that two years later I would marry a Navan-native, settle in the area and pass the station every day, miffed and mournful at its wasted potential. The line opened with ambition 172 years ago in 1850, built by the Dublin and Drogheda Railway as a branch line from Drogheda to Oldcastle. Boyne Valley Railtour at Navan, 1977, Railway Preservation Society of Ireland My station safari was rewarded by passing over the extant railway tracks at the station’s level crossing – the line is still in operation for Tara Mines – and the heralding of the former station master’s house. A typical two-storey GNR example, its red brick man has been pebbled-dashed, disguising the polychromatic contrast intended for the, still exposed, yellow b

Paradise Lost: Howth Junction and Donaghmede

Alighting onto a post-apocalyptic concrete and steel abyss I surveyed the mesh of stairs, like an Escher lithograph, leading everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. “Where am I?” asked a bemused elderly lady I had stepped onto the platform with: “Howth Junction”. “Oh dear”. Relativity, M. C. Escher, Lithograph, 1953. Oh dear indeed. Where is the front of this ‘station’? I refuse to call it one: it is merely a set of stairs and a lift. Following signs to the exit I’m greeted with a dystopian Alice in Wonderland prospect of turning left into a car park and right along an overgrown, dirty footpath. I choose the latter; at least it might lead somewhere. The path to former station master's house, Howth Junction Dodging filth like the mad hatter, the elegant brick gables, stone lintels and terracotta chimney stacks of the former station master’s house can be spied amongst a wilderness of ivy, grass and razored-fencing. Forlornly neglected, the graceful merging of Classical ped

Irish Railway Architecture

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