Building for Transport II: Railways

The first public railway in Ireland, the 8-mile line linking Dublin and Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), opened in 1834. To capitalise on its success, in 1836 parliament established a Commission to ‘inquire into the Manner in which Railway Communications can be most advantageously promoted in Ireland’. The commissioners – Chairman Thomas Drummond’s (1797–1840), (after whom the commission is sometimes named), John Burgoyne (1782–1871), Peter Barlow (1776–1862), and Richard Griffth (1784–1878) – were all experience engineers and administrators. Their first report was issued in 1837, accompanied by this atlas showing the routes of the two principal lines which the Commission advocated should be built. The southern line, set out by engineer Charles Vignoles (1793–1875), was to run from Dublin to Maryborough (Portlaoise), then via Thurles to Holycross, Cashel, Mallow and Cork. Branch lines would connect to Kilkenny, Limerick and Waterford. The northern line, laid out by John Macneill (1793–1880), was to run from Dublin through Navan, Carrickmacross, and Castleblaney, to Armagh and on to Belfast. From Navan, a second line would run via Kells, Virginia, and Cavan to Enniskillen.

The Commission issued a second and final report in 1838. In setting out the analytical and statistical justifications for the chosen routes, the Commission provided a comprehensive account of the economic and social state of the island, including a prescient warning about the overreliance of a large percentage of the population on the ‘wet and tasteless’ lumper potato (Second Report of the Irish Railway Commissioners (London, 1838), 117). By ‘affording present employment to vast numbers of the people, and by throwing open resources and means of profitable occupation’, the railways, the Commission proclaimed, would be panacea to many of the country’s ills (Second Report, 121).

Despite being generally favourable received, the Railway Commissions vision of a comprehensive centrally planned railway system in Ireland was never realised. The development of railways across the island was left instead of the vagaries of private railway companies.

The Irish Railways Commissioners and their plans

Siobhan Osgood

The arrival of railways in Ireland was far from straightforward, with parliament paralysed by its frugal grip upon Irish expenditure. The first Irish railway authorised by a Parliamentary Act was the Limerick and Waterford Railway in 1826, while the first railway line, the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, opening in 1834. Further petitions followed but, to prevent the speculative building of lines, all had to await the outcome of a Government report into their viability. The Plans of the Several Lines of Railway in Ireland accompanied the first and second Reports of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the manner in which Railway Communications can be most Advantageously Promoted in Ireland. The first report was presented to parliament in 1837 followed by the second, more complete, report in 1838.

The Commission was led by Thomas Drummond (1797–1840), engineer and Under-Secretary for Ireland. He was joined by Colonel John Fox Burgoyne (1782–1871), appointed colonel commandant of the Royal Engineers in 1854, Peter Barlow (1776–1862), Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and Richard Griffth (1784–1878), geologist and civil engineer. Captain Henry David Jones (1791-1866) was Secretary to the Commission, while Lieutenant Henry Drury Harness (1804-83) of the Royal Engineers and Instructor of Fortification at Woolwich, and Lieutenant Thomas Larcom (1801-79) of the Royal Engineers and the Irish Ordnance Survey assisted.

The purpose of the Commission was to conduct and present surveys of proposed railway lines and the best means of directing their development; in particular to determine the routes where the greatest advantages might be obtained with the smallest outlay. Advances in steam-packet ships to America were to be investigated alongside the potential of providing railway connections to ports on the west or south coast of Ireland. The Commission endeavoured to distinguish between those lines which ought to be enforced by legislative enactment and those which might be left to the fancy or ‘sagacity’ of Directors of Railway Companies.

The first report included an account of the Commissioners’ inability to complete their tasks due to the lack of sufficiently accurate maps of Ireland. This offered a very serious impediment to progress, with existing maps being ‘extremely incorrect, often, purely fanciful’ and of very ‘considerable embarrassment’. They were, however, able to rely on the maps of nine northern counties which, by 1837, Colonel Thomas Frederick Colby (1784-1852) and the Ordnance Survey Department for Ireland had produced, while a larger map of the whole island drafted for the Commissioners by Lieutenant Larcom was judged ‘far superior to any hitherto constructed’. They also used Richard Griffith’s as yet unpublished Geological Map of Ireland, a copy of which accompanied the second report. Griffith’s map highlighted expansive limestone deposits which made up the most important and characteristic forms of the country, and showed the landscape was generally free from elevated ridges thus presenting favourable levels, and excellent materials for works.

The second report detailed two lines which the Commissioners recommended be constructed from Dublin; one northward to Armagh, the second south-westward to Limerick and Cork. The task of delineating these was contracted to two ‘eminent engineers’: Charles Blacker Vignoles (1793–1875) for the south and south-western routes, and John Bemjamin Macneill (1793–1880) for the north and north-western districts. Their findings were illustrated in Plans of the Several Lines of Railway in Ireland which contained twenty-nine maps with colour-coded track lines showing suggested routes. This was printed by the engraver and lithographer R. Cartwright of Bedford Row, London, who demonstrated his finesse with an ornate window-display of fonts on the title page (9.1). Maps were reproduced using the engraved intaglio technique, with colours overlayed using chromolithography. Numerous copies of the Plans were printed, although the precise number is not recorded.

While the Railway Commissioners’ reports and Plans received public support and commendations from MPs, their proposals were never implemented. Instead, the development of railway lines in Ireland was left to private speculations, the very thing the Commissioners had set out to prevent. For the northern routes, the line was built from Dublin to Belfast, with a branch line from Navan toward Oldcastle. The line to Enniskillen branched out from Dundalk instead of Navan. Cavan was left to the Midland Great Western Railway. For the southern districts, the Great Southern and Western Railway built its lines in stages from 1844.

What is clear from the reports and the Plans is the enormity of the work undertaken to present the most advantageous development of railways in Ireland. Every aspect of trade was audited from corn mills, woollen manufacture, linen and cotton weaving, to distilleries. These documents represent the ability of a professional class of engineers, geologists, mathematicians, manufacturers, and economists. They provide a snapshot of Ireland’s social demographic and of political attitudes towards it, and highlight the contrasts between the country’s burgeoning industrial advancement and the neglected agrarian tenantry. Perhaps the most significant, and indeed lasting, outcome was the stimulation provided for the work of the Ordnance Survey which sent its entire team to Ireland to create by 1846 the first-ever large-scale map of any country. England was not fully completed to a standardised scale until the 1890s, with revisions continuing into the 1900s. The Plans and the reports they accompanied are then far more than just lines and gradients drawn across a map. Instead, they present an imagined Ireland on the cusp of industrial modernity.

Dr Siobhan Osgood is an architectural historian specialising in nineteenth-century architecture and engineering history. She is architectural historian and researcher for Fingal County Council.