RTE reports that Irish Rail have written off €50m spent on a failed IT train management system. Maybe if IR were to show the same zero tolerance towards its own behaviours as it does towards the public, there would be a better result.
RTE reports that Cork City Council is to acquire the former counting house of the erstwhile Beamish & Crawford Brewery in Cork City, with plans to redevelop the building as the city library.
In 1994, in his capacity as Minister for Enterprise & Employment, Ruairi Quinn introduced the May bank holiday in the Republic of Ireland, to take place on the 1st Monday in May each year.
As a result of this, I was able to spend yesterday and today photographing the railway lines from Collooney to Claremorris (yesterday) and Claremorris to Athenry today.
In the case of latter, in addition to re-photographing the stations, I also visited most publicly accessible bridges and level crossings, the reason being that the noise around the potential restoration of all (Athenry to Claremorris) or part of this line (Athenry to Tuam) is getting louder.
As such, these photographs will form a record of the line before any such restoration takes place.
With 200 images taken over the 2 days, it will take me a while to process and upload these to the site.
Formerly home to the Denny bacon factory, the Island of Geese area of Tralee, Co. Kerry is now a public open space in the centre of Tralee, the site having been gifted to the people of Tralee in 2014.
The Kerryman reports that an artwork reflecting the site’s industrial heritage past has been commissioned and installed near the redbrick chimney of the former factory.
The Historic Structures Fund awards for 2026 have been announced. The only property of IH significance in receipt of grant funding in 2026 is the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, which is located in the former Cork City Tramway powerhouse and depot.
The RTE 100 buildings series features another industrial building – the Padmore and Barnes boot factory in Kilkenny.
As advised recently, I have made good progress on the Royal Canal from Leixlip to the Shannon and as such, I have made a start on adding maps for the Grand Canal.
Subject to a couple of caveats (see below), maps for the Naas and Corbally Harbour branch of the Grand Canal are now online. The caveats are:
Notwithstanding the above caveats, I felt it worthwhile to add the three maps above as they had reached a level of readiness for publishing.
In light of the proposal to extend the DART to Kilcock and construct a depot for the entire Greater Dublin Area DART stock, I have updated the Gazetteer with the addition of an inset map to the Kilcock Inset Map, to show the high level proposals.
These proposals are at the very early stage of the process and are likely to be subject to change, with a Railway Order being many years away. If and when updates are required, they will be added here.
It is now official – Irish Rail has announced plans for the extension of DART to Kilcock.
The background to this was the DART+WEST plan to extend the DART to Maynooth. When planning this, Irish Rail had originally planned to build a depot between Maynooth and Kilcock albeit closer to the latter than the former (I cynically suggested in a Letter to the Editor of the Liffey Champion that the townland where the depot was to be located under this plan be renamed “OneMileShort” as the depot (and associated overhead electrification) was 1 mile short of Kilcock).
An Bord Pleannala, as the relevant planning authority, approved the extension of DART to Maynooth but not the depot due its location on a flood plain. This effectively put the plan to extend the DART to Maynooth in abeyance as without a depot to store the new rolling stock, no service could operate.
When the ABP decision was announced, I suspected that the outcome would have to be a depot west of Kilcock as any location east of Kilcock/Maynooth would, if such existed, already have been selected by Irish Rail when planning DART+WEST. In addition, the further west you go, in theory, the cheaper the land should get.
The new proposals, which are now out for public consultation, include double tracking the line from Maynooth to the new depot site immediately adjacent to the Musgraves depot. It will also include retaining the existing town station but extending the existing platform towards Maynooth and adding a second platform. This will, however, see the canoe club building on the canal relocated.
Due to the presence of the architecturally significant 5 arch Jacksons Bridge, it is proposed to build a new section of line to the south of the existing railway to allow for electrification (the track here was originally double – spacing for double track is not the issue, which is insufficient clearance for overhead electrification).
Progress on creating maps of the Royal Canal and surrounding areas has gone better than I had anticipated, with the result that I have now put online maps of the canal from Leixlip to Clondra – i.e, only the Dublin section remains to be added.
Part of the reason for this is that my mapping source is ex copyright OS maps, which work fine for rural areas, but, in Dublin, due to development led road additions/realignments, a 50+ year old base map wont work.
Adding of the Dublin map detail will follow, once I can get out driving with a GPS and map the new roads to be added.