Episode 1 Walk the Line

For me, trains are about getting from A to B,

but there are people of all ages who love

the romance of the golden age of the railway.

When the first train left Great Victoria Street for Lisburn

in 1839, it changed our lives forever.

Fast, dangerous and exciting,

the railways sped up the pace of industry,

commerce and communication. At one time almost

everyone in the country lived within five miles of a station.

People who'd never been out of their home town or village

could take a trip to the city or spend a day at the seaside.

I'm much too young to remember all that, but I've spoken to people

up and down the country who can't understand why

most of our railway network was abandoned almost 50 years ago.

I want to find out what the attraction is,

to see if there is any trace left of these old lines,

any hidden history to be found in some of the places they pass through.

And that brings us to tomorrow,

temperatures will rise to about 18 or 19 degrees for many of us.

As we look ahead towards the rest of the week and into the weekend,

plenty more dry weather to come.

Well, there you are, that was the weather, not looking too bad at all.

Perfect for getting away from the weather desk for a few days to walk the line.

I'm not off to a great start.

I'm looking for the old railway station in Downpatrick

and this is it, well, this is where it used to be.

Like stations in other towns, it was torn down decades ago.

But Downpatrick hasn't turned its back on its railway history,

in fact it has the only full size heritage railway

in Northern Ireland, and so that's where I'm headed.

I've heard about grown men and their passion for train sets,

but this is ridiculous.

Downpatrick Railway Museum has its own station and ticket office

and its own signal box controlling a short stretch of track

where the steam trains can show their paces.

It's all run by volunteers in dungarees, with oily rags,

who spend much of their time stripping and restoring carriages and engines.

One of the volunteers is a BBC colleague, Robert Gardiner.

I'm told this is the old Royal saloon,

but it's not looking very regal today, is it?

She's not, but the fact that it survives is remarkable.

She was built in 1897

and has carried King Edward VII, King George V and

King George VI, but after the Second World War it was scrapped.

Down here you've got people from all mix of life, you've got engineers,

you've got people who work on Translink or Irish Rail and you've

got others who have absolutely relatively no interest in trains

but they're interested in the various disciplines

they're involved in here, such as the woodwork

and metalwork and those sort of things.

And these guys tackle some big projects.

These particular vehicles are local carriages.

They would have been built for the Belfast and County Down Railway

and operated between Queen's Quay station and Bangor,

Newtownards-Donaghadee, as well as Newcastle and Ardglass.

This vehicle here was built in 1905 and would have operated

an intensive service between Belfast and Holywood.

-It ran for almost five decades?

-Five decades, yes.

It's essentially the grandfather of all modern railway vehicles.

You can kind of imagine the people hanging out of these trains,

-like something you'd see in the old movies.

-Absolutely.

Trying to figure out how to get the windows to drop

with the leather straps and hanging out the windows

when the guard's shouting at them to get their heads in.

-It's like stepping back in time, isn't it?

-It really is.

Even the finishes for what is a third class carriage

were very, very high. You can almost see a bit of Titanic in the designs

of the carriages of the time.

This has just been restored after about seven-odd years of work in our workshops.

After the Second World War there was a shortage of housing

and an awful lot of railway carriages were sold off,

either used as hen houses,

or this particular one has been used as a house in Guildford.

The key difference between, say,

third class and first and second class

would have been legroom and personal space.

The first class usually would have had higher seats.

You wouldn't have been mingling with the other riff-raff and...

Basically you were just buying more comfort as the ticket price went up.

This really takes us back to the golden days of the Downpatrick railway.

Tell me a bit about that. When did it begin and where did it go to?

Well, the railway from Belfast to Downpatrick was built in 1859

and was originally built to serve the courts up on the hill.

You would have had barristers and judges travelling down

by train then for the spring court sessions and

the contrast that would have been to taking the stagecoach between

Belfast and Downpatrick on a rickety road would have been dramatic.

About ten years later it was then extended on to Newcastle and to Ardglass.

I'm going to find out if any traces of that line still exist.

Good luck with that. There's an awful lot that

you'd need to know what it is you are looking for,

but there are other bits that are accessible and absolutely stunning.

Ticket bought,

and comfortably settled into my third class carriage,

I can begin to appreciate that golden age of railway travel.

Sadly, the track runs out all too soon

and I'm forced to walk the line...

if I can find it.

Well, Robert certainly wasn't lying,

it's been a bit of a journey getting here, up through embankments,

muck, brambles, but now I'm here,

it's clear to see that this is where the railway used to be.

It must be 60 years since a train travelled along here

and the traces are harder to spot with every passing year.

And the first stop after the train left Downpatrick, Downpatrick Races.

Ladies all glammed up...

..runners and riders making their way down to the start line...

and some of us a having a flutter.

Then there's the weather, as important as ever on race day.

My weather colleagues are forecasting showers.

That'll mean heavy going underfoot.

There's been horse racing at Downpatrick since 1685.

In fact, a horse that raced here was also ridden

at the Battle of the Boyne and it finished on both occasions.

The present course opened in the 1860s

and for many years the railway ran excursions to the races.

One memory is, as a very small child, about five or six years old,

being taken to the races here on this grandstand

and I remember there was a race on

and the train came along, the old steam engines,

and it stopped and people were all looking out the carriages

watching the race and the next thing, it puff-puffed

and away it went, heading towards Ardglass.

I don't think being on time to Ardglass just made all that much difference in those days.

The trains didn't just bring people here,

they actually brought the horses.

Pre-war, all animals were transported by train.

You know, cattle wagons, there were horse wagons,

we had no motorways or anything like that in those days

and there wouldn't have been as many horseboxes or cars about.

It was only the very affluent people who had a motor car,

so a lot of people travelled by train, and including the animals.

No luck. I'd have better chance predicting the weather!

Time to move on.

On the other side of the course I can see where the path

of the old railway has become the ambulance safety track

for the horses and riders.

Beyond that it headed towards Ardglass.

It's over 60 years since the railway line closed here.

Since then it has been reclaimed by nature,

covered by road and ploughed up by farmers,

but if you look closely enough, you can still find remnants of the old railways.

Just like here at Marshallstown crossing, we have bits of old track.

And once we had trains trundling along here, making their way to the coast.

The line of the old railway track runs straight as an arrow

ahead of me and it's hard to believe that trains once disturbed

the peace and quiet of this rural heartland of County Down.

And even more surprising, a short distance from Marshallstown

are the remains of what was once obviously a substantial railway halt.

It's easy to understand why some stations and halts were built.

They were in towns or villages,

they connected factories with markets, cities with harbours

and cattle markets with ports, but here in Ballynoe

there's nothing, there is no village, there is no industry,

why build a halt here?

This 1928 book of Ancient Monuments of Northern Ireland

may shed some light on that.

Here we have a map of some of our most important historical monuments

and what's really interesting about this is that

we can see that most are within spitting distance of a railway.

And, sure enough, just a short distance away

is a sign for Ballynoe Stone Circle.

This is magical.

County Down's version of the Dark Hedges.

A century ago, train loads of day trippers ventured down this laneway

to visit one of Ireland's largest ancient, man-made landmarks.

If the Game of Thrones producers are scouting for new locations,

they should take a look here.

The Victorians were fascinated by their ancient history.

Places like Ballynoe were hugely popular for excursions

and the railway companies were quick to spot a business opportunity.

When I first started my journey I hoped for a few surprises,

and this is certainly one of them.

OK, it's not as big or as famous as Stonehenge but it is impressive

and on days like this when the weather is fairly decent

it is well worth the visit.

With the closure of the railway line Ballynoe Stone Circle drifted back into obscurity.

Race goers and day trippers were important railway customers

but the branch line from Downpatrick to Ardglass was built

for more practical and commercial reasons.

Ardglass has been one of the main fishing ports

along the east coast of Ireland for centuries.

The boats are bigger nowadays and the work is much more mechanised

but in many ways the scene hasn't changed.

In the late 19th century, herring was the prize catch

and it was still a fresh fish market.

This fish had to be sold fresh for consumption within 24 hours,

so obviously you wanted to get it off the quayside

as quickly as possible,

and it would have gone to Belfast for transmission to,

to England, to Billingsgate or even to Aberdeen or something like that.

The railway network was crucial

in the development of the market for fish.

A rail line was built right down to the quayside

so that the boats could unload their catches straight onto trains

and get them off to the markets as quickly as possible.

By the 20th century, the herring catches were so big

that a major curing industry developed in Ardglass

to salt the fish and transport them further afield.

And with the curing industry came the gutter girls.

Some of the girls used to lodge with Hilda Smyth's family.

They came from Donegal and Scotland,

they came from all over and they were lovely girls, lovely.

They were out nearly every day and they got their boots on them

and fingers all ragged, for in case of the jags and things from the herring.

When we were off school in the summertime

we used to bring the tea down to them in a can,

the wee sandwiches or soda farls,

cut and butter or jam or something on them

and we would fight who'd get to carry the cans down to the quay.

It got us on the harbour. They were quick doing it, you know?

They just pulled the gut out

and we would go down and watch them, yes, and it was hard work,

dirty work,

and the big troughs on the harbour, full of herring.

You would have walked on the herring.

The harbour was absolutely covered, you could hardly get down there.

So many fish.

They would have processed hundreds of tonnes of fish.

They were paid per barrel of fish that they produced

so they wanted to work long hours, because the more fish there was,

the more they could put away and the more they would have got paid,

but certainly there were reports of them setting up flares on the end

of the pier so the girls could work right into the night.

The annual influx of a bunch of lively, young, single women

to the village inevitably set male hearts a-flutter.

I picked my wife from one of them.

They were very nice, good-looking girls.

They just turned us young boys, our heads were turned.

I suppose when the girls were staying here

they kind of helped your mum out with the cost of running the house.

Well, I think it was six shillings she got for each girl.

They came here with big trunks with them

and they had hardly anything in them and there was

a draper's shop down in Bath Street, Martin's you called it,

and they used to, when they got their pay at the end of the season,

they went there and they bought bedclothes,

and I remember my mother helping them to fold them up

to put them into these trunks to bring to the station

when they were going back to Donegal and Scotland

and all the different places that they were going.

They would have been in Ardglass for six weeks,

then they might have gone to the Isle of Man.

Because herring is a migratory fish,

the herring fishing season is quite limited,

but then you go on to the next place that the herring is

and then you go on to the next place

so they would have been working maybe from April

until the end of October,

so that would have given them six months of work.

The short curing season wasn't much use to the railway company,

nor was the herrings' tendency to disappear

from the local fishing grounds for years at a time.

They're still catching and processing fish in Ardglass,

but the branch line closed in 1950.

Back on the mainline from Downpatrick to Newcastle,

the trains passed close to Ballykinler

where there's been an army camp for centuries.

With the outbreak of World War I it quickly grew in size,

but it's only now that we're finding out how important it was to the war effort.

The men who would have come with the Ulster Division,

4,000 or more of them, were men from the city.

They were quite unused to being in a rural location,

a coastal location.

They labelled it World's End because of that.

They'd have travelled out on the train to the little halt

of Tullymurry and then eventually another little halt was created

closer to Ballykinler, just called the Ballykinler Halt

and they would have marched in here.

On a cold winter's day training here would have been quite the business

and just a real sense, I think, that the men

were getting some preparation for what lies ahead of them.

It becomes quite clear with the news coming through from France

that the First World War is going to be very static.

The power of defence has managed to trump the power of attack,

and so therefore a very ancient military feature called

trench warfare becomes dominant on the Western Front.

And when the men arrive out here, the whole process of turning

a portion of Ballykinler Army Camp into a trial

or kind of model version of the Western Front begins.

Queen's University archaeologists have been uncovering a whole system

of training trenches that lay forgotten for years

and I'm being given a first look at them.

What we have is a set of trenches

which have been dug by the soldiers themselves.

So you'll find that the trench system here reflects

what's going on on the Western Front.

You have these zigzags of the trench formation.

You have quite a sense of the depth of the trenches.

I mean, trenches have to be deep enough for a soldier to stand in them

and not find that his head's over the side of the trench

and he's going to be a victim of a German sniper.

Now, the soldiers actually in the Ulster division then leave

in the summer of 1915 and they're never really back here again,

but what happens as well, what we have to remember is that

there would have been a lot of training going on,

of new units of soldiers who were coming through,

and then very movingly, this place would have been filled with men

who had been veterans of the war,

who were coming back and recuperating.

They'd have been out here on the dunes and trying to,

no doubt, get focused again about going back to the war.

So, right the way through to 1918, for four-and-a-half years,

this place is very busy,

and thousands of men make their way through here

and many of them, of course, don't come back.

And a generation later, the process was repeated.

Ballykinler was filled with American accents as thousands of GIs

were billeted and trained at the camp before joining the Allies in Europe.

Shortly after the end of World War II,

Ballykinler Halt was scrapped and now there's no trace of it.

Sometimes it can be quite difficult to find the old railways

but here at Murlough the track has been transformed into a path

for walkers and cyclists - it's accessible, it's well signposted

and on days like today it's absolutely breathtaking.

Look at all those big stratocumulus clouds.

I've been good to myself with the forecast -

the sun should stay out all the way round to Dundrum.

Lots of birdlife along the shore.

Apart from that, I have this beautiful stretch

of old railway path to myself.

I'm not used to this sort of solitude but I could get to like it.

Dundrum was once a busy harbour, importing timber from the Baltic

and coal from England.

There was a siding down to the quay

where goods could be loaded directly onto the trains.

Newcastle was the eventual destination for the line

I've been following - the Belfast and County Down -

but I'm taking a detour to tell you about a battle for domination

that developed between it and its larger rival,

the Great Northern Railway.

The Belfast and County Down Railway reached Newcastle in 1869.

By 1880 the Great Northern had extended its line

from Lisburn to here, Ballyroney.

Apart from the monthly fair at nearby Rathfriland when this station

would have been busy with cattle and potatoes being unloaded,

you'd wonder why the GNR extended their line here at all.

But then, they weren't really interested in Ballyroney.

They had their eyes set on the jewel of the Belfast and County Down Railway line -

Newcastle, which was fast becoming a popular seaside resort.

So the Great Northern applied for government approval

to extend its line to Newcastle.

The Belfast and County Down objected.

They wanted to keep Newcastle for themselves.

There were long and bitter negotiations

before a decision was reached.

The Great Northern would build the line from Ballyroney to Castlewellan.

Belfast and County Down would build it from there to Newcastle.

They would own the track, GNR trains would run along it,

and they would share cost of manning the stations along the route.

So GNR got what they wanted - a profitable link to Newcastle.

Belfast and County Down got Ballyroney.

They were the losers in this battle of the railways.

The effect on passengers of these rival companies operating the line

was minimal, although if you were a frequent traveller,

you would have wondered why staff kept changing their uniform.

Well, part of the agreement between the companies was that

staff wore a GNR uniform one year,

and the Belfast and County Down uniform the next.

A masterpiece of compromise!

# If you're fond of sand dunes and salty air

# Quaint little villages here and there... #

The railway turned Newcastle from a genteel rest place

for the well-to-do into a popular holiday resort.

When the railway people decided that they wanted to grow outside Belfast

I can well imagine somebody saying, "Let's go to Newcastle.

"It's a wonderful setting, you have the mountains there,

"a train travelling to Newcastle will afford this

"extraordinary view along the way

"and when we get there we can offer journeys into the Mournes beyond."

It was a perfect choice for a town to expand a railway to.

The Slieve Donard Hotel was built by the Belfast and County Down Railway,

but what's less well known is that

Royal County Down Golf Club owes its existence to the railway too.

They had seen how profitable Scottish golf courses were to the Scottish railways.

The railway that we know was already here. This was 1869.

Royal County Down began to lay out the golf course in 1880.

Belfast and County Down Railway even helped build the golf clubhouse.

There were special pavilions for the travellers

coming down from Belfast to enjoy a day's golf

and a natural combination, golf course and railway,

with hotels and other accommodation following.

They would have arrived at the golf club in time to have their lunch.

They would then have played their golf.

They might have stayed a week at the hotel,

but at the same time they were also laying on penny or two pence fares

for second class, third class, fourth class travellers.

Everybody was accommodated.

They started the ball rolling for where we are today.

This is Beatty's Guide and Directory to Newcastle.

It dates from 1894.

So the hotel wasn't even around but

there's two pages here about the Belfast and County Down Railway.

"The most picturesque district of the North of Ireland

"is served by the County Down Railway."

It talks about the tourist resorts of Newcastle,

Mourne Mountains, Ardglass, Bangor, Donaghadee.

Cheap excursion fares daily during the summer

and we have a line about the golf club,

"The golf links of the County Down Golf Club at Newcastle

"are considered by competent judges to be second to none in the British Isles."

And again they talk about, "The links of the above club

"adjoin the railway station

"and command a fine view of the Mourne Mountains and Dundrum Bay."

And here we have, "The green record is 76, made by Mr FG Tait."

I'm sure Rory McIlroy could give him a run for his money.

I have a feeling Mr Tait and Mr McIlroy, the challenge is out!

THEY CHUCKLE

All along its route, the railway, from Downpatrick to Newcastle,

has left its legacy and its mark - if you know where to look for it.

But why did it close half a century ago?

After the Second World War, the railway had been running

non-stop helping the war effort, carrying troops.

No investment had gone into the network.

It was all private companies running the railways in those times.

They were running on fumes at that point and they turned

around to the government and said, "We can't carry on,"

and the Stormont government took the decision to nationalise the railways,

take them into state ownership

and it was faced with this choice, do we invest in the services?

Passenger numbers had been dropping off.

You know, we might think these vehicles have a charm to them,

but if you are a commuter in the 1950s this is ancient equipment.

You know, you want something sleek and modern and

buses and cars were the way forward.

There is no need for railways in those areas where

it's proposed to close them down.

The public haven't been using them in the past

and it's clear that there's not the traffic for a big railway service.

The government had drawn up huge plans for a motorway network.

That was the future and they saw no reason to invest in the railways

and it was just easier to close them.

I think any railway town that lost its railway still laments the loss.

Even now we're still having debates about bypasses

around Ballynahinch and bypasses around Downpatrick

and, while the roads were upgraded, the town centres were not designed

to carry the volume of traffic that they're carrying now

and so even 60 years later, we're still living with the legacy of the closures.

In the next programme I'll be finding out how a local tragedy

changed the course of railway history,

I'll take a spooky walk through Ireland's longest railway tunnel...

..and I'll be bringing together two people with special memories

of the railway at Warrenpoint -

next time on the Walk The Line.