Kevin Sweeney

looking at this photo, I see several other errors in the drawings, all of which I have faithfully replicated in my model. So much so it is not really a model of Belturbet station, but a recreation of the flawed architects drawings.

Nearly there with Belturbet. I made the downpipes with cocktail sticks, sanded down a bit and painted with acrylic paint. This was a problem I'd been trying to solve for some time. I made a terrible discovery, the station masters house has windows in the gables. I made the mistake of following the architects drawings I got on the planning portal, which showed no windows. The Crossdoney model is also missing one small window, which was missing on the drawings. This lesson has been taught to me twice now. Don't depend on architects drawings alone, they maybe missing important features, photos are essential.

Amazing work, you set the bar very high for the rest of us. I'm reminded of a story about the first gig Jimi Hendrix played in London. As soon as the gig ended someone saw Eric Clapton heading out the door and said are you not going to the after gig party Eric. No said Eric I'm going home to practice. You are sir, the Jimi Hendrix of Irish railway modelling. Inspiring stuff.

I've been thinking about Cavan Railway Station as a future project. I don't really have room for it, as in N scale it would be over 4 meters long but it would make a very impressive model with a big single arched bridge right in the centre. I am further tempted to take it on after watching a brilliant video made by local man Greg Meehan about the station, its history and its demise. A sad video, an ode to a lost world. Facebook I've been out of action for the last few days. After 7 years modelling without any accidents, I finally managed to give myself a good deep cut with a craft knife.

Getting closer to a finish on Belturbet, it's really starting to come together now. I could not resist the temptation to include a little section of narrow gauge track in the model.

The GNR went all out with Belturbet, even without the train shed it is a big station for a small town.

Thank you Leslie for your kind words. I've had to cultivate patience, in my early days modelling I was always in a rush to see a finished product and would cut corners. Now I always take it slow and will bin anything I'm not happy with and start over. As time goes on less and less stuff goes in the bin.

Yes both roofs are done the same way. The black edge is to represent the guttering, it is 200 gsm card, stained with marker.

More progress on Belturbet

I would also be in the market for N gauge Irish models.

The facia on the walls is made from two strips of 1 mm grey board. On the gable I used 300 gsm cards for the barge plates. I also put in a sub roof, made from 1 mm grey board. I had exactly the problem you describe before I starting using the sub roof. The slates are standard Scalescenes, strips glued to 200 gsm card. Hopefully the photos will give you some idea how it works

Almost there with the station house.

Current state of play on Belturbet.

About two days work cutting out the windows. I cut the card out first, then applied the paint. The trusses are not really structural and remain quite flexible. I glued the two sections of the roof together first, which are made of two layers of 300 gsm card, before gluing the trusses in place. My tip for giving some structural strength to card or paper is to impregnate it with varnish.

300 gsm card, impregnated with acrylic paint.

More progress on Belturbet. Got the basic structure of the train shed roof done. It is starting to come together nicely. 'For simplicity sake I dispensed with the purlins, which will not be visible anyway in the finished model.

Making good progress on Belturbet.

Hi Dermot I thought the story about him cycling to Mullingar seemed a bit far-fetched. I posted the photo on a now defunct Ballymachugh History Facebook group, and that's where the story came from. All my modelling work is on this thread (except the stuff I binned) and I will continue to post it here. Do you have any photos of Ballywillan, when it was open.

Making progress with Belturbet. It's been an epic session of cutting out windows the last two days, mostly for the trackside wall which has a lot of windows. Happy with progress so far.

It's great, the results are so sharp compared to hand cutting and it possible to do much more elaborate windows than by hand. It is for sure fiddly in n scale. The window in the photo was my first attempt at it. I had beginners' luck, when I sat down yesterday evening to do it again, the first 10 or 12 efforts were failures, but I'm getting an 80% success rate now.

Belturbet looks amazing with all the buildings restored. I'm hoping to get down and visit it soon. It is a particularly beautiful station. I knew the moment I saw photos I had to build it. I have architects plans for the station house, station masters house, goods shed and engine shed from the CCC planning portal. So happy days.

As usually happens I have been distracted again by another building that grabbed my attention. This time Belturbet railway station, which is not only a very beautiful building, but has a train shed. Not as impressive as Connolly Station, but an unusual feature for a small-town station. The only thing that made me hesitate to tackle it is the complex windows, which are curved at the top and my efforts to cut them by hand produced unacceptably ragged results. So, I turned to Michael at Chandwell for help and discovered the sticky label method for making windows. The photo shows my first attempt. A little ragged at the top, but with practice I should improve. The glazing bars are about one third of a mm wide. From here on in all my windows will be sticky label windows.

I'm sure that is correct but how do you disentangle that from the general negative economic impacts of partition on the border region. Would the line have been loss making if it had not been for partition. It's a measure of the important economic, social and cultural connections that once existed between Ulster counties, that 11 years after direct rail services between Cavan and Dublin were gone there was still a rail service to Belfast. On the economic upside the black economy was boosted massively by smuggling, but this came with other downsides. I'm entirely sceptical of the way economic arguments were used to justify the destruction of our rail network. All forms of transport are subsidised, but road is the most subsidised of all. The decisions were based on ideology, politics, emotions and copycat thinking. The post war western world was becoming increasingly individualistic, road transport was compatible with this idea. Rail was seen as an outdated anachronism. Orwell said they will call you a great intellectual if you provide the establishment with an intellectual rational for what they want to do anyway. This applies to transport economists. We can see it in action today, prominent transport economists droning on and on about the waste of 110 million to reopen the highly successful Galway Limerick line, while silent on the 1.14 billion spent on the Gort Tuam motorway. Your line about CIE replacing rail "with its own road services" drew a wry smile. Those road services evolved into the shambolic, ramshackle mess that is Bus Eireann in Cavan. I'm a very lucky Cavan public transport user, I am within electric bike range of Edgeworthstown and so only travel by bus when no other option is available. I do not have a good word to say about Bus Eireann, in my view, almost no one in that organisation from drivers, to route planners (especially route planners), to the CEO gives a toss about the travelling public. There is one thing better about the bus. On modern trains striking up a conversation with fellow travellers is increasingly rare. It's very easy on a Bus Eireann Cavan Dublin bus to strike up a conversation. Just say to a fellow traveller, this is a bloody awful service, and away we go sharing Bus Eireann horror stories.

Crossdoney signal box finished. A few design flaws but I'm happy enough with the result.

In another thread, I recently sang the praises of the OSI website to get the footprint of inaccessible or demolished buildings. Many years ago, the man in the reference section of Cavan Country Library told me that council engineers told him that modern OS maps have many errors, whereas the old OS maps are stunningly accurate. Here is a screengrab of Ballywillan signal box from the modern OS map. The building at the bottom of image is Crossdoney signal box from 1901. The Ballywillan box in this modern map is almost square. It's amazing that Victorian and Edwardian surveyors using simple analogue tools could produce such accuracy. And that their modern counterparts with all their digital tools can produce such inaccuracy as this. The old timers really knew their stuff.