The Stolen Railway
My interest in the story of the stolen railway was awakened as I stood in the car park of the Ferry Inn, which is a pub situated on the banks of the Shannon River in the northern part of County Tipperary. It is a part of Ireland where three counties come close together: Tipperary, Galway, and Offaly. Let me explain what it was that kindled my interest. Oh, and by the way, The Ferry Inn serves a great pint of Guinness, no kidding. And I‘m not being paid to say that.
So, across the road from the pub was this jungle, completely overgrown, concealing all it contained. Rumours were rife as to what lay within its confines, but no one dared venture in to find out. Was there a lake inside full of crocodiles and flamingos? Highly likely. What about the remnants of some castle? Well, why not? This is Ireland, old castles are all over the place here, and to be honest, more likely. They could find Dr. Livingstone here or the source of the Nile. Maybe Tarzan is swinging from the creepers. Parrots, apes, undiscovered flora and fauna could be in there for all anyone knew. Perhaps the only one who knew was the owner of the jungle.
Now up to this point, my wife and I had lived in this part of Ireland for about 18 months when the awakening mentioned at the outset took place. I had enjoyed a lovely pint of Guinness, and the wife, a Heineken Zero (she’s driving). We were walking back to the car when a sight of sheer shock met our eyes. The jungle was gone. Completely stripped and flattened, maybe by machetes from the locals, who knows. Wood had been stacked in neat piles at strategic locations around what turned out to be just a field. To everyone’s disappointment, there was no lake in there, no crocodile, flamingo, undiscovered flora and fauna from which the tourist industry could make a bob or two. No Tarzan, no Dr. Livingstone, and sadly, no chimpanzees. Oh, and no castle either. There was, however, a bridge and a derelict building.
The bridge
Part 2
Derelict buildings are everywhere in Ireland, usually with trees growing out of them, and now we have another. But the bridge was interesting. There was no river flowing through it nor a road, and as far as I could see, nothing going over it. At least not any more. It was clearly disused but I wondered what it had been used for. What went over it? What went under it? And why do they not do it anymore? So what did I do? Did I go to the library? Did I check Google? The Tourist Information office? No. I did what you always do in Ireland. Ask the locals. So the next time I went to the Ferry I talked to Barry, the proprietor, and he just said,
“Oh that’ll be the railway bridge”.
“Err, come again? What railway bridge? There’s no railway there.”
So he produced a photocopy he had made of a newspaper article that had been published some years back, all about ‘The Stolen Railway’. He kindly lent it to me so I too made a photocopy of it, returned it, and started to research. So here’s the gist of it.
This is a true story about a railway that apparently ‘disappeared overnight’. ‘That’s impossible’, you might say. Well, it probably is, but that’s how it came to be known. Eyewitnesses and rumours, probably slightly or heavily exaggerated, said that the whole thing was pilfered to extinction in a single night. Unfortunately, no one is alive to dispute this rather unlikely tale. So never mind. But, as with every myth and legend, there is surely a measure of truth in it. It is highly probable that it disappeared pretty quickly. Tales of its’ demise have been passed on to generation after generation by word of mouth over the fire over several bottles of Guinness and/or generously filled glasses of potcheen. As often happens under such conditions, black and white stories are given plenty of colour, and as liquid is involved, the colours inevitably run into each other, producing clouded facts, and extraordinary tales of fact and fiction are mixed beyond truth and recognition. But they do paint a pretty picture.
In the end, we have to piece the facts together and make up our own mind. Anyway, the line in question is the line known as the P. & P. B. R. This stood for the Parsonstown & Portumna Bridge Railway. You will not find Parsonstown on a current map of Ireland, as they changed the name of the town to Birr. Don’t really know why. And it’s not the warmest place on the planet, so I think ‘Burrrr!’ would have been the more accurate spelling, but there we are. Birr is a quaint little town in County Offaly. Portumna Bridge is situated, as the name suggests, at Portumna in County Galway. It should be noted, however, that as soon as you leave Birr and cross the water at Riverstown, you enter County Tipperary. In fact, after hitting Riverstown, it’s Tipperary all the way. It doesn’t stop in County Galway at all. Anyway, I digress. So the line stopped at the Shannon River. Check the little map on the side (or below, depending on what kind of device you are using)
The derelict building
The little map below
Part 3
Only when you actually cross the Portumna bridge do you enter County Galway, as the middle of the Shannon River is the borderline of the two counties. The current Portumna bridge was built in 1911 and is a fascinating piece of engineering. At certain times of the day, traffic is halted and a section of the bridge is opened to allow boats to go through, usually to either enter or leave Lough Derg, which, as you can see on the map, is situated South of the bridge. Anyway, this bridge replaced an earlier one, apparently built by Lemuel Cox in 1795. That seemed to have replaced a yet earlier one. The fact that he reclaimed the materials from the demolition of said bridge and was able to build it cheaply seems to have later played some role in the line’s eventual demise, but we’ll come to that later if you are even bothered to read that far. I digress once more. Where was I? Ah yes, Portumna. The bridge and the railway line. So they built it between 1863 and 1868 when steam railway travel was all the rage. Every town wanted a railway station with a ticket office and some track to take them to towns afar, either to work, shop, or just to have something to talk to the neighbours about. There were rumours that parts of Ireland had temperatures reaching 15 degrees Celsius and this had to be seen. And felt. Shangri-la was somewhere in County Offaly. Surely if there’s silver in the Silver mines of Silvermines, then surely there’s gold in the Slieve Bloom mountains beyond Kinnity. Who knows. The railways were making the world smaller, and there was an Ireland that most Irish people had never seen. You see, up until that time, transport consisted of 1 hp vehicles on four legs that generally didn’t take you very far, certainly not very fast. Four of them strung together and pulling a stagecoach was a good business idea, unfortunately, however, it was too expensive for the average Irish farmer.
Now, with the invention of the steam engine, nice cosy train stations and lots of train tracks, it was time to see the world, or for the Parsonstown people, Portumna. It also helps to know that with the invention of steam engines came also the invention of steam boats that would also operate up and down the Shannon River. Some bright spark with no money but armed only with bright ideas thought it would make sense to run a train from the Shannon river, specifically Portumna Bridge, where the boats would moor, and go all the way to Parsonstown, now Birr. In fact, in theory, on reaching Parsonstown station, one could take a further train to Dublin, spend the whole day there and return the way one had come and have lots of things to tell the neighbours about. Well, why not? The government, which at that time operated several hundred miles away in some town called London, was persuaded to bless the project. Everyone blessed the project, including the local priest. All it seems, except the Tipperary farmers, who it is claimed, received little in the way of compensation for the farming land and fields they were forced to relinquish for said project.
So the line ran from the Tipperary side of the Portumna Bridge through the green fields of County Tipperary and landed in Parsonstown. The brains of the outfit were used exclusively to build the whole thing. But when the time came to organise the running of it, the brains had left the building. The timetable was both baffling and inexplicable. Mostly baffling in my opinion. Suffice it to say that the train ran from one end to the other twice a day. When you took the second train from Parsonstown, you had approximately 21 minutes before the last train back home. If you missed it, you were cooked. Knowing the Irish people as I do now, with their bent for simple chat, love of a quick pint and leisurely pace of life, I am guessing that this happened quite frequently. If it is true that there was also a small hotel situated there, I can guess why. And I’m sure it was well used, if the people had been able to afford it.
The baffling and inexplicable timetable
Part 4
It seems from the information I dug up that there was some kind of contract that obligated The P. & P.B.R. to run the thing for a few years, and then, it was presumed, or even hoped, that they would extend the contract. Actually, to be more accurate, to extend the line. You see, the bridge that I referred to earlier, built by Lemuel Cox, was built at a relatively low cost due to the fact that he had reclaimed a lot of materials from the earlier bridge that they had demolished. So it was thought that building a second bridge to carry the railway line over the Shannon would be a piece of cake. It appeared one night in a dream to some visionary that the line would stop at a station in Loughrea, and from there to the city of Galway. A cosmic idea that the people with the money were not impressed with. Basically, because the railway was raking up a huge loss. Well, of course it was. A railway running twice a day? On that timetable? Further to this were the expected costs. Unlike the other bridge, there would be no reclaimed materials with which to offset costs. So then, no bridge. No train to Galway. And as the P. & P.B.R. was running at a huge loss, they pulled the plug on the whole thing.
The line was guarded for some time while deciding what to do with the elephant in the room. According to reliable sources, at the Shannon end, they had erected pulleys and other machinery in order to hoist heavy goods and some heavy people from the steam boats onto the train. They had also built pens in which to house soon-to-be transported animals, and a turntable to turn the trains around in order to send them back the other way. All of this with the intention of using the Shannon to generate some business for the new line. Well, it didn’t. Oh, and there was a nice waiting room, a ticket office, and as I mentioned before, a hotel, which they would need to house stranded passengers.
One day, when the guards had guarded enough, the guards were gone. And there stood a hardly used railway line, all shiny and new, ready for the taking. So they took it. It had to be taken quickly before the invention of fingerprint dusting, DNA testing and CCTV. And quickly it went. Overnight, they say. The tiles from off the station roof, the lead from the station roof, the station roof, the station furniture, and the station itself all disappeared. The sleepers went, the points, the gates, the pens, the cranes, the pulleys, the lot. Someone even found use for the turntable and lifted that. Of course, no one took a thing. Fingers (and light fingers, I should add) from all counties pointed in all directions. Tipperary blamed Offaly, Offaly blamed Galway, Galway blamed Tipperary, and someone, probably to point the finger of suspicion in the direction of away, proceeded to point to the blacksmiths of County Roscommon who, it was claimed, heard about the freebies and came down in their carts. And having loaded them up with as much as their poor horses could pull, had it on their way. Supposedly all under the cover of the moon and stars. Who knows?
This is what is left of the bridge in Ballyduff. It's not difficult to see where the railway lines once were.
Part 5
They say that some of the railway lines can still be seen serving cattle gates in the vicinity of the now all-gone railway. Apparently, as one story goes, a farmer awoke one morning and found, for some inexplicable reason, a piece of railway track on his property. Not only that, but it had been hammered into the ground and was now proudly holding up his gate. “Well, I never!” he was rumoured to have said to amazed onlookers and the Garda, while he scratched his head. It was quite obviously a miracle and, being a religious man, had determined that there it was going to stay. I mean, if the Lord wants it there, who are we to argue?
And so to the bridge that can be seen from the Ferry Inn that I was telling you about at the beginning. The train would have gone underneath the bridge and come to a standstill at the station/terminus situated on the banks of the Shannon behind where the Ferry stands. Over the bridge would go traffic travelling between the towns of Nenagh and Parsonstown. It’s not a wide bridge, but then it was wide enough to take people, the pony express, donkeys, small carts, rickshaws, anything like that. There is a makeshift gate that now blocks the way, but it is easy to climb through, so I did. Atop the bridge, I got a better view of the reclaimed field, together with the derelict building (whatever it was for), and you can roughly make out where the train would have come to a standstill.
It’s sad, really. Who knows, if management had been equipped with some common sense, maybe something practical could have been made of it. Well, never mind, it was not to be. But to whoever it was who flattened the field that revealed the bridge and whatever that other building was, bringing this story once more to life, thank you. And if you happened to have read to this point, a big thank you too. Maybe the song makes a bit more sense now.
Alan Tierney (All rights reserved)
A detailed account of ‘The Stolen Railway’ can be found in “A Lorrha Miscellany” by Seamus J. King
So bottom right is The Ferry Inn car park. Almost to the centre of the picture is the railway bridge. The arc of the trees from the bridge northwards and turning to the left is where the tracks were once laid and followed the direction of Parsonstown, now Birr. Behind me is the Shannon.