The railway station in my home town was taken up and closed down about a decade before I was born, so I grew up with the shell of a cut-stone station that represented a possibility long gone. We played basketball and indoor soccer in the empty goods shed for the station. We looked at the shut-down building, the in-filled tracklines and wonder how that closure could be ever considered as progress.
Back then we never questioned why the trains were shut down. Maybe, because the car was coming along and there was no need, no sustainable economic argument to be made.
It was the sixties and seventies — and modernisation was the buzz word. People would soon be able to travel in their own car...on their own...with the radio on, playing their own music. Windows open, hair blowing in the wind.
Before I was born, the train from Ballinrobe used to go to many places. My mother and father travelled on it on their honeymoon to Kilkee joining up with the ‘are ya right there Michael are ya right’ express made famous by Percy French.
On another occasion, my grandfather Michael Morris met the train in the 1930s to discreetly carry the urn of the ashes of the late writer George Moore back to his employers’ house from where they were taken to Moore Hall to be interred. A shy discreet man (unlike his grandson ), he never revealed his precious cargo to the many who stopped him on the way down town and asked him what time ‘Mister Moore was comin’ in on the train.’
Over the years, we played on the tracks that sank further and further into the ground as the pathway they cut through the countryside became more and more overgrown. The thought that trains once ran along this way seemed impossible to imagine. For us, the concept of a train in our hometown was akin to imagining the horse and cart. The asscart replaced by the Ford Asscart.
So many towns were left naked without a train. I think now of what towns like my own could have done with a train if it still ran. How they could become dormitory commuter towns for the cities. How they would reduce the need for the amount of freight that clogs up and destroys our roads in the necessary distributuion of goods to our consumer society.
Towns like Tuam and Athenry and Claremorris and Clifden and Moycullen and Oughterard; how more vibrant they would be if they saw a daily disembarking of 1,000 tired souls from work in the city. How many students would be able to come and go without having the need to fork out thousands of euro in dead money each month.
The announcement by the two Governments yesterday that an all-island plan for rail is to be implemented by 2050 is welcome. We live on an island small enough to traverse quickly. The rail lines cut through the most beautiful places. No need to be stuck in the Dirty Thirty at Bothar na dTreabh when you could be flying through the scenery at 150kph.
If this plan comes to fruition, I’ll be well into my eighties, so am not holding my breath that I am ever going to experience the joy of a train to Shannon or a train up to Claremorris. But, I like the way they’re thinking. I already give up a month of my life every year to being stuck in traffic. Any option that reduces this for future generations is welcome.
