When the train came to Mullingar, part 2 of 2
The history of Mullingar Railway Station 1848-2023 (part 2 of 2); read part 1 here
By Ruth Illingworth
A wide variety of people travelled on the MGWR line from its opening. In the early years of the station, prisoners from the county jail in Mount Street who had been sentenced to be transported to Australia were loaded on the trains at a siding beside the jail for the journey to Dublin and the prison hulk.
In 1853, 100 teenage girls from Mullingar workhouse were driven by coach to the station, where a special train was waiting to taken them to Dublin on the first stage of their journey to a new life in Canada.
Migrant agricultural workers used the trains to travel from Mayo and other western counties to work on farms in Leinster or in Britain. Even into the 1920s and ‘30s, ‘Harvestmen’s Specials’, as they were known, passed through Mullingar station on a weekly basis, carrying hundreds of men from the west. For large numbers of local emigrants, the station was the last they ever saw of Mullingar. Most travelled third or fourth class on one-way tickets. Tickets could be purchased at Mullingar straight through to stations in Britain such as Liverpool, Manchester and London.
Even into the 1950s, the evening trains connecting with the boat train to Dun Laoghaire were filled with people emigrating to Britain. The trains were referred to as ‘Lizzie’s express’ in a reference to Queen Elizabeth.
The first special excursion train to Mullingar by rail was in November 1849, for the November Fair. The railway soon offered opportunities for people from the town to travel to Dublin or elsewhere on business or for pleasure. Organisations such as the Holy Family Confraternity and the Pioneers took their members on annual excursions to the seaside. Special trains were laid on to carry hundreds of people to events such as the funeral of Parnell in 1891 and a major Temperance Rallies in Dublin in 1914 and 1924. From the 1890s, local GAA and other sports clubs used the railways to travel to away matches.
Famous Visitors
A number of famous people have come to Mullingar by train over the last 175 years. The first was The Duke of Cambridge, uncle of Queen Victoria, who arrived in May 1850. He was Commander in Chief of the Army in Ireland and came to inspect troops at the barracks.
In later years, the MGWR had a special Royal carriage used to transport visiting members of the British and other Royal Families around the country. The future King George V and his wife Mary visited Mullingar twice, in 1897 and in 1905. On the occasion of the 1897 visit, where they changed from the Galway to the Sligo line, they were greeted by senior railway staff and by members of Mullingar Town Commission, who presented them with an address of welcome.
Empress Elizabeth of Austria passed through the station and stopped briefly while she was on holiday in Ireland. The MGWR would later name one of their locomotives ‘Empress of Austria’ in her honour.
James Joyce came to Mullingar by train in 1900 and 1901 and he later mentioned the station in his novel ‘Stephen Hero’.
In ‘Ulysses’, Leopold Bloom thinks about visiting his daughter, Millie, who is working in Mullingar and notes that the fare is only two and six return’.
Patrick Pearse also arrived by train in February 1902 to give a lecture to the Mullingar Gaelic League Branch. The writer and actor Tom Conlon, writing in the Westmeath Examiner in 1951 about his childhood in Mullingar, wrote that: ‘The Mullingar pastime of “seeing the trains come in” certainly produced excellent results in those days, as it gave us the opportunity of at least seeing, close at hand, such great literary and political lights as Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, Edward Martyn, John Redmond, William O’Brien, John Dillon, Horace Plunkett, Hugh Lane, Tim Healy and many other distinguished people.’
In June 1919, hundreds of people gathered at the station to see the transatlantic airmen, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, as they passed through Mullingar on their way from Clifden to Dublin. Two days before their arrival in Mullingar, they had become the first people to fly non-stop across the Atlantic.
Their train stopped in Mullingar for about 15 minutes on the up Galway platform, where they were interviewed by the local press and were presented with a model wooden plane by local businessman, Thomas Govans.
The Band of the East Yorkshire Regiment played tunes and, as the train pulled out of the station, all the engine horns and whistles blew.
War at the station
The station was used by the military to move troops to and from the barracks and Mullingar was described in a military report in 1870 as being an important junction and ‘almost the very focus of the whole rail network in Ireland’. From the station, hundreds of soldiers headed off to fight in the Crimean War, the South African War, the First World War and numerous colonial wars in Africa, Asia and New Zealand. An armoured train was stationed in Mullingar during WWI and a Red Cross carriage was used by the Royal Army Medical Corps.
During the Easter Rising, all Dublin-bound trains were stopped at Mullingar and hundreds of passengers were stranded at the station for four days. People camped in the refreshment and waiting rooms and on the platforms and food soon began to run out. A local priest organised food deliveries to the passengers and local people offered accommodation. Rail services as far as Clonsilla were able to resume on Thursday.
During the War of Independence, a number of railway employees gave support to the Mullingar IRA Brigade. Drivers refused to transport soldiers travelling to Longford on one occasion and after a short stand-off, the soldiers left the train and went by road instead. On another couple of occasions, trains carrying petrol to an RAF base in Galway were diverted to a siding off the Sligo platform and the petrol was dumped into a field. Another train was stopped at Lough Owel and military equipment removed and thrown in the lake. The Goods Shed was raided a number of times and military equipment and cases of cigarettes removed.
In March 1921 the Longford Westmeath IRA Leader, Seán Mac Eoin, was arrested at the station by soldiers and police as he was on his way home to Longford. He made an attempt to escape his captors at the top of the Station Yard and ran down Dominick Street, but he was shot and wounded and taken to the military barracks before being sent to Dublin by road.
His next visit to Mullingar station, following the truce and his release, was a much happier occasion. He was greeted by bands and cheering crowds and the station was decorated with green, white and orange bunting.
During the Civil War, there were attacks on the rail network by republican forces across Westmeath. Several trains were derailed in Streamstown and signal boxes were burned near Moate and Multyfarnham. In Mullingar, the railway bridge over the Castlepollard Road was blown up and a signal cabin near Loreto College burned. To counteract the republicans, the Free State government set up the Railway Protection and Maintenance Corps in February 1923 to protect the rail network. The corps comprised soldiers and railway staff. Mullingar became the midlands HQ for the corps and the soldiers at the station were given an armoured plated locomotive which they called ‘King Tutankhamun’ after the recently discovered Pharaoh.
The Bretland Tracklayer
In 1924, the chief engineer of the MGWR, Alfred White Bretland, invented a revolutionary new method of taking up and laying track, which greatly speeded up the process. The tracklayer was carried on a train and moved along a gantry. Mullingar became the main depot for the Bretland Tracklayer and a gantry with a span of 65 feet and a run of 500 feet was built beside the Galway line. That area of the station became known as ‘The Gantry’.
The Tracklayer took up more track than it ever laid. In 1929 a decision was taken by the railway authorities to single-track the line from Dublin to Athlone and Galway. After the completion of that work in the 1930s, the Bretland machinery lay largely idle in the station until new work was found for the gantry in the 1960s, when old steam engines were sent there to be broken up after the arrival of diesel locomotives.
The station since 1925
The year 1925 was an important one in Irish railway history. On New Year’s Day, the railway companies in the Irish Free State were amalgamated into one company, known as Great Southern Railway. A similar amalgamation took place in Northern Ireland. After 80 years the MGWR ceased to exist. The amalgamation led to large scale job losses in Mullingar and other Westmeath stations.
Over the following decades, the growth of road traffic brought an end to the ‘Harvestmen’s Specials’ and the growth of marts eventually led to an end to the Livestock Specials too.
The branch lines began to close from the 1930s. The Cavan line was taken up in 1959 and the Clara Branch in 1963. The closure of the racecourse in 1967 brought an end to the Newbrook siding, although the two platforms remain. In 1973 CIÉ decided to reroute the majority of Dublin Galway trains through Portarlington rather than Mullingar. That was a major blow for Mullingar as the number of trains through the station declined greatly.
The Mullingar Athlone line closed completely to passenger traffic in 1987, although some freight traffic continued for a time. The line was transformed into the Old Rail Trail Greenway in 2015.
The station was still a busy place throughout the mid-20th century, however. The locomotive shed had 19 drivers into the 1970s and large amounts of freight still arrived daily for distribution around the town. The Refreshment Room in the main building was upgraded into a restaurant known as the Newbrook Buffet (it is now the ticket office).
The Evening Press newspaper had a late news printing depot in a room on the Down Galway platform for a time. In the 1940s, Westmeath County Council upgraded its road building plant and tar was carried in bulk tanks by rail as far as Clonmore Bridge, where a pilot engine or spare engine was used to heat the tar.
The first diesel trains began operating in 1954 and a diesel plant was established at the station, while the gantry area became a busy place due to the breaking up of the old steam engines. ‘Raz’ Dalton from Ballinea, who worked at the station for 50 years, recalled a workplace where hundreds of passengers passed through the station daily and where there were hundreds of employees. “There were whole families at that time in the railway like the Byrnes, the Keenans and the Larkins and droves of Horans.”
As part of the celebrations of the Roman Catholic Church’s Marian Year in 1954, the railway staff paid for a statue of Our Lady, which was erected in the Station Yard.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland had workshops on the Galway line, where they repaired carriages and engines. Steam train excursions came to Mullingar around Easter annually for many years. Scenes from the 1978 film ‘The First Great Train Robbery’, starring Sean Connery’ were filmed at the signal cabin and further down the Galway line at Castletown Geoghegan and Moate stations, and Mullingar drivers handled the vintage trains used in the film.
The 150th anniversary of the station in 1998 was marked with a weekend of events, including a visit by the ‘Slieve Gullion’ steam engine, a book launch and the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the anniversary.
Plans were drawn up to have a transport museum in the buildings on the Galway line, though, unfortunately, that did not come to be. The No 2 Signal Cabin on the Galway line was closed and demolished in 1968. The No 1 Cabin remained in operation until November 2005, when it was closed with the switch from manual to computer signalling.
The Travelling Post Office Service ceased on the Sligo line in 1976 and the TPO finished completely nationwide in 1994. Mullingar Railway Station is a much smaller and quieter place now than it was until the late 20th century. The goods shed is closed and large numbers of buildings on the Galway line are in a sadly derelict state, including the locomotive shed and the row of houses on Clonmore Road, where senior rail staff lived until a few decades ago.
Fortunately, the Sligo line remains busy and Mullingar has become an important commuter station for Dublin. The station precinct has also become an important bus stop. The main buildings were renovated in the 1990s and the station has won awards for its tidiness and fine floral displays.
The railway station has been an important part of Mullingar life for 175 years and has contributed much to the town. Its buildings remain fine examples of Irish railway architecture and a significant part of the built heritage of Westmeath. Hopefully, a way will be found to restore the derelict buildings on the Galway side to their old glory and some use found for that side of the station before the station celebrates its 200th birthday in 2048.