Kevin Sweeney

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 Rail was seen as an outdated anachronism.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.

The Dutch solve this problem with underpasses, so farms are not divided. The problem was solved on the Great Western Greenway in Mayo with 2 gates and holding pens facing each other. I see several similar farm crossings on the Sligo Dublin rail line. I understand the view of farmers, I'm a rural resident and a former dairy stockman. I understand their views I just think they are irrational, as the problem is easily solved. A greenway is a country lane, 4 meters wide, carrying slow moving cyclists and pedestrians. It is less of a problem than having a farm divided by a quiet country road, which is quite common. I remember the ferocious resistance in Galway some years back to the proposed Athlone Galway greenway, yet two motorways have been built in the county without any resistance whatsoever by the farming community. The problems big road projects cause to farmers are far greater than greenways, yet the minor problem caused a storm, but the bigger problem caused hardly a ripple. Ultimately, I think the problem is we are a car centric society. People accept the massive disruption caused by road building projects because they are car users themselves, but object to public transport and cycling project because they don't used these modes of transport.

As a non-car owning cycle commuter and a regular cycle tourist, I see the value of greenways. But I don't understand why they will not CPO farmland and build them that way. If my sums are right one hectare of farmland will give you 2.5 km of greenway. One hundred km of greenway would require 25 hectares of land, the equivalent of a modern small farm. By all means use abandoned branch and narrow-gauge lines for greenways but building them on abandoned mainlines is nuts. There are plans to build a greenway on the old GNR line from Cavan to Clones. If any part of this island needs its railways restored, it is the border region. The five border counties of Cavan, Monaghan, Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal don't have a single railway station. This area is half the size of the Scottish Highlands, has twice the population and no railways, the highlands have a good network. Throw in Armagh with one station, Derry with two, Meath with a few stations on its southern and eastern fringe, and Leitrim with two stations on its southern fringe and you have a vast tract of territory devoid of railways. Nowhere else in western Europe is so totally devoid of rail services. A disgraceful indictment of successive governments in both parts of this island. When Tod Andrews took away our railways, he promised us "efficient bus services", instead we got Bus Eireann. I can't speak for the rest of Ireland but BE services in Cavan are shambolic, far worse now than they were 40 years ago.

I have a good friend a retired civil engineer, he tells me a fully loaded articulated truck will cause the same damage to a road as approximately 30,000 cars. If the road haulage industry had to pay for that wear and tear themselves, the economics of rail freight would look much more attractive.

This a screengrab from the OSI website, it shows the signal box in 1901. I find the OSI site invaluable as a resource for getting the dimensions of demolished buildings or buildings I can't get access to. This may or may not be helpful to answer your specific question, as BSGSV says the cabin was changed in the early 1910s and destroyed in the civil war. GeoHive Map Viewer

I remember it well, my first career in the late 1970s was as a dairy stockman. I used to draw milk to the local creamery in Kilnaleck, Co Cavan. I missed it when bulk collection came in the early 1980s. The morning trip to the creamery was a social occasion, as well as a welcome escape from the farm. The highlight of the working day.

Happy enough with progress. I'm glad I picked a small project which I can finish in a short run. My problem finishing bigger projects is that I see some new building I like the look of and get diverted into modelling that rather than finishing the existing project.

It's an advantage of N scale that the finer details can be fudged and still look good from a distance. In bigger scales fudged details stand out a lot more.

More progress with Crossdoney diorama. including my first experiments with scatter. The long winter nights and bad weather are great for modelling.

Making progress on the Crossdoney diorama. The shelter is the smallest structure I have yet modelled. The windows look very ragged up close but work fine when viewed from a distance.

I'm on a steep learning curve right now. Landscaping, laying track, ballasting, and buildings platforms are all new to me. Rather than make big mistakes on the Ballywillan layout, I've decided to make a small diorama based on Crossdoney Station and make my mistakes on a small scale first.

Graiguenamanagh Creamery for the Bellmont layout

Cork track bed laid. Next job is the platforms. I will then finish the top right surface, which is lower ground

Thanks for the tip, it sounds easier to work than plywood.

Back doing some work on Ballywillan, after another hiatus. I've started work on the first section of baseboard. I've made the main frame, which is 1600 mm long and 550 mm wide. The south end of the baseboard (nearest camera) will be totally flat. Except for a 4 mm rise on the western edge. I will use a piece of ply 887 mm long by 550 mm wide for this. The map of Ballywillan (below) shows the main frame and plywood baseboard as red rectangles. On the northern end the ground will rise 10 mm to the NW corner and drop 14 mm at the NE corner. The trackbed will remain flat. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to create this non flat landscape, but I'm experimenting with plywood templates, to give me the basic shape. I've used Google Earth to survey the ground (below). The number in the bottom right hand corner of the image is the altitude in feet, under the mouse. It makes surveying the ground a breeze. Once I get this section finished I will make extensions to the north and south