Category: Site Updates

A second update – having spent today in Northern Ireland taking photos, I now have recent photos of most of the canal. The only missing section is that from Maydown through the Benburb cutting to Milltown (both exclusive). With the information I had to hand in the field, I could not do this section justice and as such, will make a return trip to cover this section.

I have also added an inset map of Clones to the Ulster Canal map.

As I stayed overnight in Northern Ireland on Saturday, I productively used the trip up there to photograph the station sites on the now fully opened greenway from Navan to Kingscourt and also visited the sites of Glenanne and Loughgilly stations in Co. Armagh. These will also be added to the site shortly.

I have updated the page for the Ulster Canal with a better map, as well as links off this for the 26 locks on the former canal.

This is a work in progress, with not all locks having a photo page created yet – I plan on being in Northern Ireland on Sunday to visit the sites I didn’t get to in July and these will be added to the site (and linked off the aforementioned page) when available.

The last ghost station on the Irish Rail network is no more – Kishoge Station in Dublin on the Dublin – Cork line is now open, as of 26th August 2024.

I have updated the Gazetteer to reflect this and created a webpage for same. No photo yet – I will get to this shortly.

The main feature of this site, that is a work in progress (due to the scale of what is required) is the Gazetteer. Currently, this is railway stations only but the long term plan is to cover all IH features.

One thing that has been holding me back is how to efficiently get information out of the master database I have developed over three decades of my interest in IH (stored in Microsoft Access). In the last week, I cracked this problem in relation to the creation of photo pages for the photos I have taken and placed online.

The other area I have been aware that my site was lacking in was presentation. The html pages are basic (largely hand coded html) without CSS and associated stylesheets.

I have now updated all stations (barring 2 minor stations) on the Dublin to Sligo line with a new format (using CSS) that I intend to roll out to all locations. The new photo gallery pages for each location are now a link to a separate page (see here for Mullingar as an example) for each photo, with a narrative explaining the image.

During the update of the pages for the Sligo line, I encountered a few errors in the data in my underlying database and these have also been corrected. This is a secondary benefit of this process.

It is my intention to continue the rollout of this new format across the site.

I am, as advised previously, currently updating pages in the Gazetteer to add in latitude/longitude references. All open stations are now updated and I have started work on closed stations on open lines.

Whilst doing so, I was looking at the photo I have online for one of the many stations to have existed in the Rosslare Harbour area and I think it is of one of the other stations.

I will be carrying out an exercise to fix this in due course.

I have started the process of changing the site information on the gazetteer pages, by removing the reference to the OS 1:50000 maps and adding in a latitude/longitude reference in its place. When traveling the country to photograph features, the latter is more useful for use in the likes of Google Maps.

So far, the two Kilcock stations are the only pages to be so updated – the rest of the open stations on the island of Ireland will follow shortly, with closed stations to follow after this.