Author: ewan.duffy

Another weekend, another trip to Northern Ireland. Due to the realpolitik of driving a Republic of Ireland registered car, I have tended to prioritise taking photographs of historic station locations in the Republic of Ireland over Northern Ireland.

This weekend, through combination of bike and train, I successfully visited many former station sites on the railway between Belfast and Larne Harbour.

However, this post is about Grand Central Station. I had the need to use the facilities in the station and, notwithstanding that the station is only open for 4 months, one of the 5 stalls in the gents was out of order, the lock on the door of another stall was missing and the stall I used, the hi tech “button” to flush the toilet did nothing (i.e. failed to flush).

Therein lies the problem with State investment. Governments will provide a lot of money for one off investment in capital projects, but not a red cent towards ongoing maintenance costs. Having said that, I’d have expected the facilities in Grand Central to still be operational 4 months after opening.

I traveled southside for the first time in a long while today to photograph the stations from Glenageary to Bray.

At Shankill, I noted that Irish Rail has taken de-staffing to the extreme by walling up the ticket office, leaving a building with no ability to staff it (reminder to IR – the present byelaws don’t reference TVMs – if no staffed ticket office, technically, there is no need for a ticket).

Anyway, the thought struck me, as there is separate access to both platforms not going through what was the ticket office, why maintain this building?

Notwithstanding that it was built in the 1970s as a ticket office, it would surely be within the capability of CIE, the property development company, to repurpose this as a 1 bed house and sell it. Bijou residence, adjacent to DART station, council owned carpark adjacent where a resident’s permit could be arranged. They could even throw in a villa ticket* to smooth the sale.

* Villa tickets were a 19th century idea of the (private sector) railway companies. They were typically granted by the railway company to anyone building a new house in designated areas near to the companies’ stations for a period of up to 10 years, the idea being that this would encourage such development and increase the usage of the railway line in the process.

I found this video on YouTube which explains the track layout at Connolly Station in Dublin very well whilst covering the issue of why the station is a bottleneck.