Kevin Sweeney

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.

The last regular passenger services on the line were in 1947. CIE suspended the service during the 1947 snow and never reinstated it. There were some specials for football matches in Dublin and pilgrimages to Knock in the 1950s. My mother recalls using Virginia Road Station in the 1950s. A cousin told me about his father getting the train from Dublin to Cavan via Clones in the 1950s. Like much else in the region, partition presumably had a negative impact on the line.

Some progress on Crossdoney bridge and signal box

Ballywillan stays on the back burner a bit longer. I'm still stuck in Crossdoney, extending the diorama to the south. The road bridge is the main design challenge here. I've used printouts from the 1901 OS map to get the positions right. All made so far with 2 mm mountboard.

Agree 100%. The extension is an ugly post-modernist monstrosity, which completely destroys the beautiful, classically designed lines of the Station House. Cavan County Council applied the exact same "heritage" planning principals to Farnham House, the greatest, most important and most intact of Cavan's big houses. until it became the Raddison hotel in this century. Raddison built a huge post-modern extension onto the back of Farnham House. Just like Crossdoney but on a much bigger scale. There is no meaningful protection for historically important buildings like these in the Republic of Ireland. A more rigorous regime applies north of the border.

Very nice photo. The station house has been renovated, extended and is being lived in again. There is a current planning application to turn it into a restaurant. In one way it's good to see it being used rather than lying empty, but on the other hand, the line really should be restored. This is what it looks like now. I'm tempted to add to the diorama by extending it to the south and adding the road bridge, signal box and railway cottages. But that would be a future project after Ballywillan. The project that really tempts me is Cavan station, which was a terminus for both the MGWR and the GNR. There was a massive single arched bridge over the road right in the middle of the station. It would be a spectacular model, unfortunately, in N scale it would be 4 meters long.

Crossdoney diorama complete. It's been a very useful learning exercise. Now back to Ballywillan.