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 Belfast for Lisburn in 1839,

it changed our lives forever.

Fast, dangerous and exciting,

the railway 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 hometown 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's any trace left of these old lines,

'any hidden history to be found

'in some of the places they passed through.'

And that brings us to tomorrow - temperatures will rise

to about 18 or 19 degrees for many of us.

Then as we look ahead to the rest of the week and into the weekend,

plenty of 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.

If it's not too strange an idea,

I'm going to start my walk at the end of a line.

This line, part of the old Ballymena, Cushendall

and Red Bay railway route. As the name implies,

it should have gone all the way to Cushendall and Red Bay,

but railway engineers were defeated by the steepness of the slope.

So this is the last stop, Retreat high up in the Antrim Hills.

This uninhabited railway cottage and platform,

close to the ruins of Retreat Castle on this desolate moorland,

marks the end of the line.

And the reason the line ends here

is that for the train to ever reach its proposed destination of Red Bay,

the line would have had to drop around 1,000 feet

over four miles, zigzagging its way down the Glens towards the coast.

Our journey today will take us through

some of the most breathtaking scenery of County Antrim -

from the Glens to the coast...

..over rugged rocks and rushing rivers,

through lowlands and highlands.

In fact, the Ballymena, Cushendall and Red Bay line

made it to a summit of 1,045 feet above sea level,

making it the highest point ever reached by an Irish railway.

The line of the old railway runs past Essathohan Bridge

and straight as an arrow ahead of me and down Glenballyemon.

It's hard to believe that trains

once disturbed the peace and quiet of this landscape.

But this was once a commercial centre, a hive of activity.

Hundreds of workers mined iron ore out of these hills.

Hundreds of horses carted it down the mountains.

This area became well known for its high-quality ores

when James Fisher from Barrow and Furness in northern England

started his mining operation in Glenravel in 1866.

This was before large-scale mechanisation.

Mining was very labour intensive and demanded a lot of local man power.

At first, it was difficult to find competent workers,

but in a short time, ordinary farm labourers

adapted to the difficult work

and most were capable of picking two to three tonnes of ore each day.

I'm on my way to meet local historian and tour guide,

Donnell O'Loan.

Donnell, how are you?

Hello, Barra. Good to meet you.

So what is this, apart from a ruin?

Well, it certainly looks like a ruin, but it's the last,

most noticeable feature of the iron ore mining of Glenravel.

-Indeed, they were taking iron out of the ground.

-They certainly were.

And it's hard to realise just looking at the windswept area here

just with sheep,

that there are actually miles, miles upon miles of underground tunnels,

where so much iron ore was taken out of the ground.

And once upon a time, you had hundreds of men here

and hundreds of horses all as part of this operation.

Yes, they estimate that there were 700 miners working here.

It was the most intensive iron ore mining period in Ireland.

And when you say iron ore,

what did it look like when they were taking it out of the ground?

Well, it certainly didn't look like a piece of iron or a nail.

It looked like...this.

This is one sample of iron ore.

So this big orange rock?

This bit orange rock, and you can feel that it's actually quite heavy.

How did they get this out of the ground?

Well, it was done by manual labour, using tools like picks,

shovels, wheelbarrows, and I have one of the picks right here.

And, as you can see, it's quite short

because work in the mines was so cramped.

It was very difficult work, very dangerous work,

and I certainly wouldn't like to have had to do it.

So they took this out of the ground and then what did they do with it?

The problem was there was plenty of iron ore here,

but there was nothing to smelt it with.

That had been tried using peat, but unsuccessfully,

so the iron ore had to be taken cross channel

to places like Cumberland or to Scotland

and that meant it had to be taken to a port.

How did they get it off this hill?

The problem here was that there's a very steep slope

down into Cargan village, like a ski slope, we might describe it.

And that meant that wagons couldn't be taken down it,

so a special system had to be produced in order to do that,

and that is what we have here, the drum.

There was a large wooden cylinder

which was suspended between the two walls,

and a cable around it that lowered the wagons to the bottom

of the steep hill which is on the other side of it.

700 men, hundreds of horses...

-Big operation.

-Well, 700 men working here and, of course,

this was the original reason why the railway had to be developed.

Ore production was at its height in 1880

when almost 120,000 tonnes of ore was locally produced.

However, the richest ores in this area were soon mined

and almost as quickly as it had appeared, mining disappeared.

Fisher's mines, the original Glenravel mine, closed in 1913.

And the miners... Well, they had little choice.

They either migrated to Scotland and England to continue mining,

or fell back into their former agricultural jobs.

This sculpture keeping watch over the glen

is called The Angel Of The Drum.

It was designed by Ned Jackson Smyth

to celebrate the area's one-time association with iron ore mining.

The human outline, depicted by the rust-coloured steel,

symbolises man's connection with the rust-coloured earth.

I'm really glad something remains of the iron ore industry.

Something else which remains, only just,

is the station building and water tower at Parkmore.

That was the last stop for passengers

on the Ballymena, Cushendall and Red Bay railway route,

and that's where I'm headed to now to meet Peter Irvine,

also known as Irishmanlost.

Peter is a dereliction photographer.

He travels all over the country

searching for places unseen by the public.

Over the past decade, he has visited and photographed abandoned buildings

under the pseudonym Irishmanlost.

He wants to create an artist's vision of these buildings

before they are gone forever.

-Pete, why are we here?

-We're here basically to record the building

and basically to see what's left of it.

The fact that they're not going to be lasting that much longer,

as you can see, on this one here, the walls are about to give up.

A lot of them have already...crumbled.

Yeah, I would say another couple of seasons

and this building will be no longer, so...

This is the reason why I come to shoot these type of buildings.

And some people might wonder why you actually do this.

It's like walking through history.

People that have lived here and gone on or possibly died,

things like that, it's always good to record them

before people build new buildings

and then they wonder what was here before.

So that's why I do it.

When you're out taking your photographs,

what exactly are you looking for?

Basically, I'm looking for not only the details, but sometimes it's just

a door or a window, or, erm, remains of what's been used beforehand.

Even the fireplace can be quite an interesting shot.

Well, I was about to say, there's not very much in this area

that would suggest that this is a train station,

but you see the old fireplace here

and you can almost imagine the passengers huddled around the fire

during the winter months waiting for the train.

Some of the buildings I've been in,

the fireplaces are usually the first things that disappear.

But any ones that are left are actually very interesting features.

Have you photographed any other railway stations

and, if so, how does this one compare to those?

I have photographed stations both here in the north and in the south.

This is probably the barest one of them all.

It's hard to pick out any details within the building.

There's nothing really left, it's basically scraped clean.

And it does seem a little bit different. This is concrete.

A lot of the railway stations

are in the red brick or yellow brick as well,

which make a much more interesting subject to photograph.

Concrete can be difficult.

The water tower's just up the track bit, and it's red brick

with the water tower on the top

and it's an interesting subject to photograph.

When passengers left Parkmore station,

they made their way to a line of jaunting cars,

a bit like a modern-day taxi rank.

But, like the trains, they've disappeared.

Siobhan Ni Luain was born and reared in Glenravel.

She was a prolific writer of poems and short stories

and many of her poems were written about her childhood memories.

This one is called The Narrow-Gauge Line.

"Looking up through the trees, leaning out from the door

"I shall never again see the train from Parkmore

"With its small, shining engine so sturdy and grand

"And it winding its way through the length of the land.

"You never knew what that small train might be bringing

"To the halt by the bushes with all the birds singing

"With its soft train of smoke and its rumble of thunder

"And who would get out would be half a day's wonder.

"When I was a child I'd have said that forever

"The train would endure, just the same as the river

"But the world's in a hurry with your life and mine

"And it hasn't much use for a narrow-gauge line."

Let me tell you about a man called Berkeley Deane Wise.

His title was Railway Civil Engineer,

but that doesn't do justice to his structural designs,

some of which still exist today,

like Portrush and Whitehead railway stations

and the place I'm heading to now...

..the tea room at the foot of Glenariff,

the queen of the Glens.

BD Wise worked under Edward John Cotton,

General Manager of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway,

and together they developed the most prosperous railway in Ireland,

showing a particular flair for the promotion of tourism.

So, as well as his normal work on the railway and its stations,

Wise designed promenades, bandstands, footpaths,

golf courses and tea rooms.

Mark Kennedy is curator

of Road and Rail Transport, National Museums, Northern Ireland.

The railway companies may have been concentrating on industry,

but he had the foresight to see that tourism could bring in the money.

Very much so, yes. His normal stock in trade

would be railway stations.

Good track, bridges, that sort of thing.

Erm, to design his own tea rooms in a very distinct style

-is something really quite unusual.

-Why did he do it?

I think he was very interested in the tourism potential of Ireland.

Along with his boss, EJ Cotton, they did a number of things of which

this was probably the first large-scale development.

The idea that they would lease one of the Glens of Antrim,

build a tea room, add in a photographic dark room

for use by the public, was really cutting-edge stuff.

I suppose it's like having Wi-Fi available today, something like that.

Is this typical of his signature look?

Yes, he was reputed to have gone on holiday to Switzerland

and come back with a new look with hipped roofs,

very steep pitches, a sort of a mock-Tudor or stockbroker-Tudor

black and white timbered look,

very often with the downstairs in a nice orangey brick colour.

The best example probably would be Portrush railway station,

probably the best one surviving.

And indeed, something like this would have helped develop this area

into a little tourist Mecca.

Very much so, yeah, even today.

It's still a lovely, dramatic place

with loads of tourists in the car park here.

But it must have been really quite something in the 1890s to come here

and if you think of the late-Victorian and Edwardian costumes

of ladies in full-length dresses,

to actually come out into the wilds of County Antrim.

And it's still here today.

It must have been quite successful in its time.

It was originally hoped that the narrow-gauge line

would make them a profit from the iron ore business,

but when that fell away, the tourism stuff came in

and did really well for them for many, many years,

to the extent that even in the 1930s,

they actually bought the property outright from the landowner.

And this isn't the only part of his legacy.

We have Portrush railway station, Whitehead railway station...

How unusual was that for a railway engineer?

Wise managed to pack an awful lot in

to less than 20 years with Northern Counties.

He developed Glenariff here, Blackhead Path and Whitehead

and ultimately, the Gobbins,

I suppose is his best-remembered feature.

William Makepeace Thackeray, best known for his novel Vanity Fair,

wrote a travel book in the 1840s called The Irish Sketch Book

and when he visited Glenariff,

he described it as "Switzerland in miniature".

BD Wise would be happy to know that his waterfall walkway

still attracts visitors from all over the world.

The Ballymena, Cushendall and Red Bay line

brought their ore down to the main station in Ballymena.

I am staying with a narrow-gauge line,

but this time the Ballymena to Larne route which opened in 1877.

Passengers may have been an afterthought on the Cushendall line,

but not on this one,

which ran the most luxurious narrow-gauge boat train in Ireland.

My route takes me through Moorfields.

The railway station opened here in 1878

for passenger and goods traffic.

The two-storey, red-brick station house

still stands in a cutting under the bridge.

The signal box is also a reminder of train traffic.

A linen beetling mill and dyeworks provided employment

and a Post Office, store and dispensary

catered for the other needs of this small community.

The nearby Kells Water river is fast-flowing

and supplied water to the beetling mill,

the mill now vanished from the landscape.

This is the townland of Ballyboley and looking around,

it's hard to understand why a railway station was needed here.

But, of course, Larne is just down the track

and this line was used

for the transportation of cattle, people and paper.

But before I reach the busy seaport of Larne,

the train line runs through here - Clements Wood.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known to you and me

as the great American author Mark Twain,

is reputed to have observed,

"I spent a fortune researching my ancestors

"and another covering them up again."

But would he have said that if he'd ever visited this part of the world?

Mark Twain was of Scotch-Irish descent

on both his mother's and father's side of the family,

his father being related to the Clements of this neck of the woods.

It's nice to enjoy the solitude of this forest

before my journey takes me onwards to Larne.

Looking out across the lough from beside the James Chaine Tower,

I watch the ferries power their way in out and of the port.

The Ballymena and Larne railway line opened in 1878

and boat trains ran to Larne Harbour station from Ballymena,

as well as Belfast on the standard-gauge line

via Carrickfergus.

Known as the short sea route,

Larne-Stranraer was the route favoured by most businessmen

travelling to and from London and at Stranraer,

trains with sleeping accommodation met the ships.

The steamers, since the introduction of regular sailings in 1872,

were mostly named after princesses -

Margaret, Maud and the infamous Victoria

which sank in 1953 off the County Down coast in treacherous weather

with the loss of 133 lives.

Trains may still run to Larne harbour on the mainline,

but not as a special boat train.

And the ferries don't sail to Stranraer either,

marking the end of 120 years of formal rail and sea connections.

Writer and broadcaster Colm Flanagan

recalls, with affection, the boat trains.

We're told that the narrow-gauge, the boat trains here,

were the most luxurious in Ireland,

if not the whole of the British Isles. What made them so popular?

Well, the narrow-gauge was built because there wasn't enough money

to build standard or broad-gauge railway.

So it was a cheap way of doing things,

so inevitably, passenger comfort was not really

a priority for the management of those companies.

They trundled along quite slowly.

I mean, if you were doing 30mph, that was flat out

and that was considered unsafe.

So really most trains meandered through the countryside,

stopped at all kinds of little places maybe a mile or two

from the nearest village, shunted some wagons - the passengers sat on.

But to actually have a special train which ran nonstop

over 25 miles of track was unheard of, so these carriages

with corridor connections, toilets, electric lighting,

they were really mainline carriages on this narrow-gauge.

That was what was unique about them.

Your father was heavily involved with them as well

and he would have known the boat trains. What were they for?

Well, to give an example of how my father used them,

he worked in what was called the Ulster Transport Authority

and in fact he was actually a busman.

And he used to go over to work in London.

He would leave home in the morning, travel to work in Belfast,

get the boat train, as it was called, to Larne.

It was a special fast train that didn't stop

at the intermediate stations.

Then he would get the ferry over to Stranraer, go to London

on an overnight train, do his business, come back the next day.

So the boat trains both sides of the channel were very important.

The ferries were run by railway companies initially

and so they made the trains connect with the boats.

-And hence the name boat train.

-Exactly.

Colm was a boarding pupil at Coleraine Institute

and going home for the weekend, he can remember with excitement

the sight and sound of the train as it approached the station.

He started filming those train journeys,

but this lifelong enthusiasm for trains

was sparked even before his school days.

Tell me why you love the railway so much.

My interest in the railway started when I was about five years old.

I was given a train set and my mother said,

"If this isn't looked after, it will get taken away."

But it didn't and for some reason,

I just became more and more interested.

Through my teens and then when I was in my late teens,

I got interested in the railways of Ireland through meeting a friend

at school who was fanatical and was, in fact,

writing a book about them at that time

even while he was still at school. So he failed his exams.

Here we are, you are a railway enthusiast.

Your dad's closing the railways.

There must have been a bit of conflict there.

Well, in fairness to my dad,

he wasn't actually responsible for closing them, but he was part

of the organisation which was involved in closing the railways.

Yes, we did, we used to argue the bit. Were trains better than buses?

And the fact is, there's no one answer to that question.

Trains do certain things exceedingly well,

that's why we still have railways today.

They carry large numbers of people very quickly between fixed places.

They're very good at that.

But they can't possibly have a network that covers all the houses,

all the places of work that people need to go to today,

because society is so much more scattered now.

We travel in our cars all over the place.

We want something that'll do that for us. Trains can't do that.

Earlier, we visited Glenariff where I told you about railway engineer

Berkeley Deane Wise and his visionary ideas.

So I've left the boat trains of Larne,

hopped down to Ballycarry, en route to one of his most spectacular

engineering masterpieces - the Gobbins.

Just as at Parkmore Station,

jaunting cars would have been available

to take tourists along this route, but I'm enjoying the walk.

One of Wise's most spectacular civil engineering masterpieces,

The Gobbins Path, which winds its way dramatically under cliffs

over 200 feet high on the Islandmagee coastline.

The construction started in May 1901.

The Gobbins cliff path was built

so that tourists could literally walk over water -

a heart-stopping, mind-blowing trail

that ran along more than two miles of cliff face,

all of it just a few feet above the waves of the Irish Sea.

The railway company advertised the Gobbins as a walk with ravines,

caves and natural aquariums that has no parallel in Europe.

Berkeley Deane Wise was a visionary

and what a legacy he has left for us all to enjoy.

He was an outstanding civil engineer.

In his obituary, The Railway Engineer Journal recorded,

"Berkeley Deane Wise's designs were both original and artistic

"and he always strove to make the stations under his charge

"as attractive as possible.

"He was a great lover of the beauties of nature

"and he will perhaps be best remembered as one

"who made several of the beauty spots of a beautiful country

"easily accessible without in the least marring their natural charms."

When this cliff path opened in 1902, it drew worldwide acclaim.

Newspapers of the day said, "The varied beauty of this cliff path

"baffled all description." I would certainly agree.

Till next time, bye-bye.