PUBLIC TRANSPORT

All Photographs Supplied By William Murphy

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COBH TRAIN STATION

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PHOTOGRAPHED IN MAY 2023

RUSHBROOKE RAILWAY STATION

When I arrived in Cobh the weather was beautiful but about twenty minutes later I had to return to the station in order to shelter from an intense thunder storm. I decided to get the next train towards Cork city centre but as the weather had improved I got off the train at Rushbrook but after about twenty minutes more rain arrived.

Cobh railway station serves the town of Cobh, County Cork. It is located in a red brick building adjacent to the town’s Cobh Heritage Centre.

It is the terminus of the on Cork-Cobh section of the Cork Suburban Rail line. Travel to Glounthaune station to transfer to Midleton.

The station opened 10 March 1862 and was closed for goods traffic on 3 November 1975.

It began life as the terminus of the Cobh (then Queenstown) section of the Cork, Youghal & Queenstown Railway.

The present station occupies only a small part of the old station building. The original station was expanded greatly during the latter part of the 19th century as it served what was then Ireland’s largest emigration port which was also an important way-point as the last port between Western Europe and North America. The station was also the main receiving centre for mail for Ireland and Britain from the United States and Canada. Mail would be brought by ship to Cobh, processed and forwarded by mail express trains to Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) on the outskirts of Dublin and on to Holyhead. This was faster than conveying by ship directly to Liverpool.

It is famous for being the station where hundreds of survivors of the RMS Lusitania disaster left the town of Cobh after surviving the sinking.

With the development and growth of transatlantic air traffic Cobh lost its importance as a mail and passenger centre. A significant part of the train station remained largely unused until the opening of the Cobh Heritage Centre in the front part of the station in the 1980s. At that time the station was also reduced to a single platform. The freight yard of the station has now become a public carpark while another part of the station has become a covered carpark for Cobh Garda Station.

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THE DOCKLANDS TRAIN STATION

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UPPER SHERIFF STREET

Services run to M3 Parkway during peak times, Monday to Friday. The station is closed on Saturday and Sunday. Passengers need to change at Clonsilla for connection with the Maynooth service.

Docklands Station is a terminus railway station serving the Dublin Docklands area in Ireland. It is owned and operated by Iarnród Éireann and was part of the Irish Government’s Transport 21 initiative.

The station is one of three termini for the Western Commuter service run by Iarnród Éireann, the others being Dublin Connolly and Dublin Pearse.

The station was officially opened for commuter services by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern at a temporary location on Sheriff Street in the North Wall area of Dublin’s Northside on 12 March 2007, construction groundbreaking having taken place on 9 March 2006 with Transport Minister Martin Cullen. It is the first new heavy rail station in Dublin city centre since Grand Canal Dock opened in 2001. It was required because the nearby Connolly Station had reached capacity and could not support additional commuter services to County Meath.

However, in March 2008, it was reported that the transport minister, Noel Dempsey, would allow CIÉ to seek new planning permission to keep the station on a permanent basis as a terminus for services from Maynooth and Navan following his decision to allow the Railway Procurement Agency to use Broadstone Station for extensions to the Luas.

LUAS TRAM STOP AT BROADSTONE AND THE ENTRANCE TO GRANGEGORMAN UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

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I USED AN OLD SIGMA CAMERA

I am still experimenting with my old Sigma DP1 Quattro and today, 24 April 2023, I photographed in manual mode and underexposed as the camera was inclined to over expose despite any settings that I make.

In the “Lotus-Eaters” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses Bloom imagines that the couple leaving the Grosvenor Hotel are “Off to the country: Broadstone probably,” and in Wandering Rocks Mr. Dudley White stands on Array Quay “undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus.” Both passages refer to a railway station in the northwest part of inner Dublin, at the top of Constitution Hill between Smithfield and Phibsborough. In 1904 it served as the terminus of the Midland Great Western Railway Company, whose trains went to the west of Ireland.

Broadstone railway station was the Dublin terminus of the Midland Great Western Railway (MGWR), located in the Dublin suburb of Broadstone. The site also contained the MGWR railway works and a steam locomotive motive power depot. The Luas tram station opened at the front of the station in 2017.

It is currently the headquarters of Bus Éireann, housing most of their administration and one of their main garages.[2] Nearby on the same property is a Dublin Bus Depot.

In June 2013, Luas Cross City – a construction project which extended the Luas Green Line North from St. Stephen’s Green to Broombridge – commenced. The line, which opened to passengers on 9 December 2017, traverses the city centre on street-running track and arrives at Broadstone. It then enters into the Broadstone cutting where it continues on its own right of way. Broadstone – DIT is a Luas stop on the line. Its name refers to the fact that it was intended to be the closest stop to Dublin Institute of Technology Grangegorman campus. However, the plans were changed at a late stage, adding Grangegorman stop, which is closer to the campus. Construction of the stop involved excavating a large amount of earth from the land in front of the station, and building a road bridge over the tracks which buses can use to access the depot. The Luas stop has two lateral platforms and is in front of the station building. It was built several metres below the station in order to make it level with Constitution Hill; and a curved, white wall separates the southbound platform from the garden in front of the building. Trams approach the stop from Dominick Street Upper and continues by passing under the new bridge and turning sharply to the right, where they traverse the edge of the bus depot and enter the cutting.

A few years ago i was offered a Sigma DP1 Quattro at a very good price and while I had a bad experience with all my previous Sigma cameras I decided to accept the offer especially as the camera could produce .dng images but, as you may have guessed, there were many problems that can be really annoying. The DP1 Quattro is a fixed lens camera aimed at enthusiasts who demand the best image quality in a reasonably portable form factor. Announced in September 2014, it’s a unique camera in many respects, employing an unusually-shaped body, a fixed focal length lens and a sensor unlike any outside of Sigma’s range. It also eschews modern features we take for granted on other new cameras such as Wifi or even a movie mode. The DP1 Quattro is all about still photo quality.

MAYNOOTH RAILWAY STATION APRIL 2023

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A BEAUTIFUL SETTING

The station is situated on the south side of the Royal Canal, opposite Dukes’ Harbour. Access to Maynooth is by either the footbridge to the west, which leads to the Main Street of Maynooth; west along the canal walk to residential areas of the town, or via the road bridges to the east, which lead north to the older part of Maynooth, or south to the newer areas.

The station has two staffed ticket desks and four automated ticket machines, one inside and three outside the station building. The ticket office is open from 06:00 AM to 23:15 PM, Monday to Sunday.

The footbridge crossing the tracks and connecting the two platforms was originally situated at Lansdowne Road railway station.

From Maynooth onwards to Sligo, the line is a single-track railway, the line being a double-track railway from Maynooth to Bray.

The 2018 NTA Heavy Rail Census showed 6,625 passengers using the station on the day of the survey, up from 6,228 in 2017 and 5,262 in 2016.

GREAT VICTORIA STREET RAILWAY STATION

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BELFAST CITY 2016

I only visited this station once and that was in 2016 and it was not a pleasant experience because of the lack of space. According to some that I spoke with it cannot cope with demand during morning or evening rush-hour.

Great Victoria Street is a railway station serving the city centre of Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is one of two major stations in the city, along with Lanyon Place, and is one of the four stations located in the city centre, the others being Lanyon Place, Botanic and City Hospital. It is situated near Great Victoria Street, one of Belfast’s premier commercial zones, and Sandy Row. It is also in a more central position than Lanyon Place (ironically named Belfast Central until September 2018), with the Europa Hotel, Grand Opera House and The Crown Liquor Saloon all nearby.

Great Victoria Street station shares a site with Europa Buscentre, the primary bus station serving Belfast City Centre. It will be replaced by Belfast Grand Central station, a combined bus and railway station, by 2025.

The station is on the site of a former linen mill, beside where Durham Street crossed the Blackstaff River at the Saltwater (now Boyne) Bridge.

The Ulster Railway opened the first station on 12 August 1839. A new terminal building, probably designed by Ulster Railway engineer John Godwin, was completed in 1848. Godwin later founded the School of Civil Engineering at Queen’s College.

The station, built directly on Victoria Street, was Belfast’s first railway terminus, and as such was called just “Belfast” until 1852. By this time, two other railway companies had opened termini in Belfast, so the Ulster Railway renamed its terminus “Belfast Victoria Street” for clarity. In 1855 the Dublin and Belfast Junction Railway was completed, making Victoria Street the terminus for one of the most important main lines in Ireland. The Ulster Railway changed the station name again to “Great Victoria Street” in 1856, in line with a change of the street name.

In 1876 the Ulster Railway became part of the Great Northern Railway (GNR), making Great Victoria Street the terminus for a network that extended south to Dublin and west to Derry and Bundoran.

Express passenger traffic to and from Dublin Connolly station was always Great Victoria Street’s most prestigious traffic. The GNR upgraded its expresses over the decades and in 1947 introduced the Enterprise non-stop service between the two capitals. As Belfast suburbs grew, commuter traffic also grew in volume.

In 1958, the Ulster Transport Authority took over Northern Ireland’s bus and rail services. Three years later Great Victoria Street station was modernised, and a bus centre incorporated into the facility. Then in 1968, a large section of the 1848 terminal building was demolished to make way for the development of the Europa Hotel, which opened in 1971. In April 1976 Northern Ireland Railways closed both Great Victoria Street and the Belfast Queen’s Quay terminus of the Bangor line and replaced them both with a new Belfast Central Station, now renamed Lanyon Place. The remainder of Great Victoria Street station was demolished.

After a feasibility study was commissioned in 1986 it was agreed that a new development on the site, incorporating the reintroduction of the Great Northern Railway, was viable. The Great Northern Tower had already been built on the site of the old station terminus in 1992, and so the second Great Victoria Street Station was built behind the tower block, yards from the site of its predecessor. The new station was opened on 30 September 1995.

The current station has two island platforms providing a total of four platform faces. Platforms 2 and 3 run the full length of the site and open onto the station’s main concourse. Platforms 1 and 4 are half the length and are accessible by walking down the other platforms.

Great Victoria Street is the hub of Northern Ireland’s suburban rail services, with Bangor line, Derry~Londonderry line, Newry line and Larne Line trains all terminating there.

NI Railways has built a new traincare facility next to Adelaide station for its new Class 4000 diesel multiple units. The opportunity was also taken to improve the infrastructure at Great Victoria Street; the plan to begin with was to reduce the curves by realigning the track, and moving the buffer stops and the route from the platforms to the concourse to the other side of Durham Street. Additionally there were plans to add a fifth platform to the station, which would have culminated in Enterprise services transferring from Lanyon Place to Great Victoria Street. However, under Translink’s subsequent plan to build a new integrated transport hub, the proposal has expanded to the potential construction of a brand new 6–8 platform station on the site of the old Grosvenor Road freight depot, close to the existing station, because the existing site is too constrained for any further expansion.