As mentioned previously, the long awaited memorial to the Factory Girls in Derry has been installed. I visited Derry at the end of March and took a photo of the new memorial.
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Factory Girls Memorial, Derry
Month: April 2025
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RTE Nationwide – Dublin Port
Nationwide is a thrice weekly TV programme on RTE1, covering local interest stories not covered in mainstream news reports.
The three editions in the week commencing 28th April 2025 (Monday 28th April, Wednesday 30th April and Friday 2nd May) are devoted to Dublin Port and may be of interest.
H/T to the yaycork.ie website for bringing this to my attention.
The Galley Head Lighthouse in Cork will be open to visit on Sunday 27 April 2025 between 1200 and 1700. For those wandering around the grounds of the lighthouse, there is no charge but a charge of €5 applies for those wishing to climb the lighthouse tower.
Parking is not available at the lighthouse, but a shuttle bus will be running to/from the lighthouse to facilitate visitors.
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Gazetteer – South Down
I have resumed processing the photos I took recently and updating these to the Gazetteer.
I am happy to announce that those of all stations on the former line from Scarva to Newcastle via Banbridge are now online.
I finally got around to setting up a ChatGPT account, one of the features of which is the ability to create AI generated images. The issue of copyright in such images is unclear, with advice veering towards copyright not been held by the person who initiated the request.
I asked Chat GPT to produce 2 images and to be fair, it did a middling job.
I was in Southampton over St. Patrick’s weekend and came across a memorial to the Titanic in the city.
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Site milestones
Nothing to do with roadside features – just a post to note that my image collection has, in recent days, hit 15,000 railway digital images and 3,000 canal images.
To commemorate this, digital railway image 15,000 and digital canal image 3,000 are below:
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Gazetteer update
For the past while, I have working away in the background on version 2 of the Gazetteer and am happy to announce that this has now gone live, with the old version swapped out and the new version online.
Part of the reason that an upgrade has taken so long is that I insisted on ensuring that the underlying data to populate the webpages for each station was structured correctly in my Access database which I use to record the data and create the webpages. This had secondary advantages of uncovering some errors, which have been fixed in the course of the project and allowing me to setup my system to more efficiently create new or updated webpages.
Updates to the gazetteer include:
- 85 main maps instead of 65, allowing for a cleaner look
- Railway/canal based greenways are included*
- Primary rivers added
- The main canals have been added
- LUAS lines and stations added (webpages for these are in progress)
- The ability to add more detailed inset maps (a start has been made on this – see Monaghan Town for an example).
In addition to this, I have updated all the station sites with a latitude/longitude co-ordinate as more appropriate to the Googlemaps era than an Ordnance Survey Map. The OS grid reference remains as a secondary geo reference.
WHAT’S NEXT?
- Canal locks to be added and a webpage for each
- LUAS stations to get a webpage
- Inset maps to be improved on with main roads added to give better context
- Addition of opening/closing dates for all stations
- An active effort to visit the station locations that remain without a photo taken.
In relation to the latter, I have made a start on this, with recent weekend trips to Downpatrick and Derry enabling me to visit a large number of formerly un-visited stations in Counties Derry, Tyrone and Down. Now that I have gone live on the updated gazetteer, I can resume processing the photographs taken on these trips and get them online.
*This is something of a work in progress. The main greenways (e.g Waterford Dungarvan, Mullingar Athlone) are marked. Smaller sections of old railway now in use as a public walkway will be added if/when I become aware of them.