Irish Railway Architecture

A bright, blustery day in November whipped me up on the DART to Portmarnock. A quick nosey at the station and off to the Velvet Strand trá for gasps of fresh winter air were the planned order of the day.  Alas, this was not to be. The brutalist cement and steel manifestations of station furniture, none of it looking particularly convivial, greeted my arrival. “Oh, it’s one of those non-station stations”, I thought, disheartened. Portmarnock Station facing north The station as a stop on the original Dublin and Drogheda Railway line was opened in 1844. But any physical manifestation of Victorian architecture was not to be found. The gale-force bleakness of the day did little to quell my sense of fruitlessness, and so after wandering around the surrounding roads and carpark, the irony of signage for ‘Station House’ and ‘Station Manor’ bedecked upon new and under-construction residential estates when the station didn’t actually exist was not lost on me. The archetypal castellat...

Following my summer jaunt along to Howth, the next leg of my journey follows the original Dublin-Drogheda route constructed by the eponymous railway company before being taken over by the Great Northern Railway. I’ll give some history here and then each future post will be about each station as we head up to Drogheda. Front of Drogheda Station Photo: Josh Lim (2012) The Dublin and Drogheda Railway Company (DDR for short – I don’t want to keep writing it in full!) was formed following advocacy in 1835 from Thomas Brodigan of Pilton House near Drogheda. He was made a Freeman of Drogheda in October 1836 following months of wrangling in the House of Lords, before the DDR was given Parliamentary approval on 13 August 1836. Brodigan was somewhat of an adventurer, undertaking his ‘Grand Tour’ travelling to Spain, Italy and the Middle East between 1845-6. But back to Leinster. The route of the DDR was contested (hence the parliamentary wrangling) by a splinter group who wanted the line...