Pringles, skittles and a ham sambo: check. Camera, phone, pen and notepad: check. Steely determination: let's see. This August bank holiday weekend marked the official start of my station spotting. Or, for the sake of sounding like a researcher proper, industrial archaeological fieldwork. There is more to my journey of discovery than nipping out of the carriage for a few moments to snap the front and side elevations of a railway station. For sometimes the station doesn’t actually exist. It’s been demolished, replaced by a metallic non-entity as per the DART stations which provided my modus transportus (sorry), or perhaps the original station is located at a completely different location than at the one which currently operates, albeit serving the same locality under the same moniker. Then there are the railway cottages, station masters’ houses, train sheds, engine sheds, electricity generating stations (yes, actually) and of course, beloved signal boxes. The majority of these a
Images, histories and blogs about Ireland's railway architecture