END OF THE LINE

 

What happens when things get old, stop working or go out of fashion.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, there were 27 unique narrow gauge railways and tramways in Ireland. The last of these to close was the West Clare Railway in 1961, a line immortalised in song and remembered by railway enthusiasts as a special railway with more than its fair share of lore and colourful stories which ran from Ennis, the county town of Clare through a unique landscape to the wild Atlantic coast at Kilkee and Kilrush. There it stopped for the next station would have been America! Even at the time the closure of the West Clare Railway was controversial; a small fortune had been spent on improving the line and converting to diesel traction, passenger numbers were good and County Clare was heading for a tourist boom due to the advent of trans-Atlantic jet travel through Shannon Airport.

 

 

Opened throughout in 1892, it connected the market town of Ennis with the coastal settlements of Kilrush and Kilkee. Dogged by money problems from the outset, the Railway was propelled into the limelight in 1896 when the entertainer Percy French was prevented from fulfilling an engagement in Kilkee by the breakdown of his West Clare train - his poem 'Are Ye Right There Michael' and the resulting Court case ensuring a lasting worldwide fame for the Railway, although not in circumstances it would have chosen!

Moyasta Junction Station, Co.Clare, is located on the 1887/95 narrow gauge West Clare Railway, which ran from Ennis to Kilkee and Kilrush on the Shannon Estuary