Qualla: Ballaghaderreen Branch Line

Ballaghaderreen Branch Line: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last passenger train from Ballaghaderreen left the station at eleven-fifty on the morning of Saturday, 2 February 1963, hauled by an 0-6-0 steam locomotive numbered 574. On the return journey from Kilfree Junction, a local band met the train at the platform and played it home. A final special cattle train left Ballaghaderreen at 15:22 that same afternoon, drawn by a diesel locomotive numbered B133. With that, the Ballaghaderreen Branch Line - opened by the Midland Great Western Railway in 1874 to connect the town to the Dublin-Sligo main line - was gone. The track was lifted. The station building entered its long slow dereliction. The bog the line had crossed reclaimed the cuttings. Sixty years on, the line still has friends who would like to bring it back, this time as a walking and cycling greenway.

Ballaghaderreen Branch Line: How a Branch Line Got Built

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Midland Great Western Railway opened the Ballaghaderreen branch in 1874. The financing arrangements turned out to be brutal for the original shareholders. When the accounts were eventually settled, 13,300 pounds went to the Board of Works to repay the construction loan, and t...

Ballaghaderreen Branch Line: The Route Through the Bog

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The branch left the main Dublin-Sligo line at milepost 112 and a half, at Kilfree Junction, with its own platform. Freight trains arriving from Sligo could enter the branch without having to reverse. From the junction the line curved off on an embankment and dropped steeply down ...

Ballaghaderreen Branch Line: The Locomotives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Different classes of steam engine pulled the line over the decades. Up to the 1940s, the J26 0-6-0 tank engines of the MGWR Class E (renumbered GSR 551 Class after the 1925 merger) were the regular workhorses. In the 1950s, the G2 2-4-0 tender engines of the MGWR Class K - GSR 65...

Ballaghaderreen Branch Line: Adjournment Debate, 1944

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the parliamentary record for 21 June 1944, in a debate ostensibly about the Portlaoighise-Mountmellick Railway, a member of the Dail noted that the Ballaghaderreen branch had closed but had been reopened on the behest of another member of the house. The reference is offhand bu...

Ballaghaderreen Branch Line: A Greenway Through Boggy Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ballaghaderreen Chamber of Commerce has proposed converting the old line into a community greenway - a walking and cycling route that would run along the old trackbed from Kilfree Junction to Ballaghaderreen, passing the disused station at Monasteraden and the dramatic views ...