Not in Ireland (but I am genuinely surprised that CIE haven’t tried this as an excuse).
Thankfully, the local council have stepped in and demanded that they apply for retrospective planning permission (I hope that this is to allow the council to refuse such permission).
Located at the southern end of Co. Antrim, close to the Lagan Navigation, the station at Moira was an attractive one, with the original station building on the Up side (the oldest original railway building on the island of Ireland), the former signal cabin preserved at the Belfast end of the station (albeit not on its original site) and an original GNR(I) style waiting shelter on the Down side.
Separately, the DOE(NI) had a storage base on the Dublin side of the station. This makes you wonder how this monstrosity slipped through the planning process:
This one passed me by when first announced – possibly because I reckoned it would come to nothing.
However, per the Irish Independent, it looks like a Velorail project (basically a bike on rails) may come into existence on the disused railways around Claremorris.
In 1917, due to coastal erosion, the railway line between Bray and Greystones was deviated inland for the final time (for the moment!) with the construction of Bray Head No. 4 Tunnel. This commenced almost immediately south of Bray Head No. 3 Tunnel and replaced a long section from there to just north of the harbour at Greystones. Part of this route had already been deviated in 1888 – the remains of which can be seen on GoogleMaps:
At 1,084 yards long, this is the second longest railway tunnel in use in Ireland and just north of the south portal, there is an air vent.
Very few photos of this exist and I am not surprised. It is located on private land and is not accessible from nearby roads nor the Bray Head cliff path.
I went out to Greystones today to see how close I could get and the photos below are the best I could achieve:
Google gave me a link to this page on the Government of Ireland website, in connection with the preparation of a new World Heritage Tentative List for Ireland.
I noted that one of the suggested sites for inclusion is “Trans-Atlantic Cable Ensemble: Valentia, County Kerry-Heart’s Content, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada”.
What drew my attention and is the genesis of this post, was the list of experts consulted by the civil service Irish Government. These include:
“Ms Jane Jackson, Industrial Architectural Expert”.
Never heard of her.
The BBC have an article examining the possibility of using the heat of groundwater in abandoned coalmines to heat homes/businesses. This looks at both the possibilities and the potential drawbacks.
I have seen videos on YouTube of systems in Europe involving a motorised chair on a single rail, which takes its user around a closed loop system at speed, as a form of entertainment.
I have never been on one, but with such a system now appearing on the island of Ireland (outside Belfast per the Irish Independent), I might get a chance.
WI have launched their online, digital archive, containing many historical documents from their archive collection.
The site can be accessed here.
What looks like a good news story at first, turns out to be a bit of a damp squib.
Irish Distillers makes its pre-1937 employee records available to search online – so far so good. However, to do this, they have gotten into bed with Ancestry.com who have carried out the digitisation and as such, expect a return on their investment.
Access to the resource is available for free in July 2021, but will be commercialised after that.
The Irish Independent reports on the reopening of the greenway along the former North Kerry line in Limerick, referring to it as previously being known as the “Great Southern Greenway” (sic).
This doesn’t do justice to those behind the former Great Southern Trail, who championed (and delivered) the idea of what we now call greenways long before anyone in Ireland knew what that term meant.
Further south, there appears to be little movement on the section of line in Kerry nor on the Fenit branch.