An Irishman’s Diary about the Waterford and Tramore railway

After nearly 56 years, the cut still rankles in Waterford and Tramore, the demise of their railway line, on which the last train ran on the last day of December 1960.

The railway was short, a little over 11 kilometres, and the journey time from Manor Street station in Waterford to Tramore was a quarter of an hour. It had opened on September 7th, 1853, after that great railway pioneer William Dargan had built the line in a mere seven months, including over Kilbarry bog near Waterford.

Originally the plan had been to build a railway from Waterford to Cork, but when that foundered, local business people in Waterford, many of them Quakers, came up with the idea of the train to Tramore. The £77, 000 needed to build the line was raised locally. It was the only line never connected to the rest of the Irish railway network.

Seaside resort

For many people in Waterford and beyond in the south-east, the line provided a quick and easy way of getting to the seaside, and it was the making of Tramore as a seaside resort. In those far-off days, before bicycles were popular and before the motor car had been invented, the train was a novel mode of transport. Later, in 1929, a reporter from the

Daily Express

in London described it as “the jolliest little railway in the world” .

One Waterford man who lives in Tramore, Frank O'Donoghue, a former chief executive of Waterford Chamber of Commerce, knows the story of the railway inside out, and I met him recently. In 2012, he published a superbly produced book called The 5- Minute Bell, on the history of the line; it proved so popular that a second edition, with even more material, was published in 2013. It is full of local reminiscences.

He detailed, minutely, the whole history of the railway and also assembled an amazing array of old images. The trains were powered by steam locomotives, unique in their own way, for 101 of the 107 years that the railway operated. All the maintenance was done locally, at Manor Street station. The line was entirely self-sufficient.

The collection of carriages was elderly and eclectic, so much so that some people called the train a ” moving museum” . But the trains were capacious, holding up to around 1, 000 people.

The most spectacular of the few accidents happened on an August night in 1947, when the last train arrived from Waterford and sailed through the wall at the end of Tramore station, on to the roadway, narrowly missing the hundreds of people milling around, waiting to catch the train back to Waterford.

The train had also managed to avoid all the damage to the railways caused during the Civil War. But all the railways in the Free State were amalgamated into the Great Southern Railways in 1925, which meant that control passed to Dublin; then in 1945, the railways became part of CIÉ.

Up to 1925, under local ownership, the railway had always paid a dividend, and this loss of local control helped ensure the line’s eventual demise.

Cheap fares were introduced in 1952 and they induced a short-lived boom in traffic, with 14 trains a day in each direction. All traffic records were broken and the carriages were packed. It looked like a bright future for the railway, but that optimism was a mirage.

For the last six years of its life, the line used diesel railcars, but by the end of the 1950s, the line was losing £3,000 a year. As Frank O’Donoghue says, rather ruefully, another tuppence on the fares would have cleared the deficit. When the train was replaced by buses, the bus fares were dearer. In 1959, the year before it was shut down, the line carried over 400,000 passengers.

Last year, Waterford County Council took over the old Tramore station, and it is hoped that in its new incarnation it will include a museum. Many people still have artefacts of the old line. Manor Street station in Waterford cannot be revived; it was demolished years ago.

According to Frank O’Donoghue, rebuilding the Waterford to Tramore line would be very difficult, even if Tramore now has more residents than Dungarvan. But another local heritage line, the Waterford & Suir Valley Railway, from Kilmeaden to Waterford, has already proved popular.

The five-minute bells that used to give intending passengers advance warning of train departures may have disappeared, but the memories of the marvellously idiosyncratic Waterford to Tramore train are still fresh.