Qualla: Ballina Railway Station

Ballina Railway Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Contributer1000, CC0. On 19 May 1873, the first train pulled into Ballina railway station. Within decades, the platform had become one of the most emotionally charged places in the county. This was where families said their final goodbyes to children leaving for America, watching them carry their trunks onto the train that would take them to Cobh, then to a steamer, then across the Atlantic to a country none of them would ever return from. Photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show large crowds at the station before sailings, women in shawls weeping, men awkwardly shaking hands. Ballina is the town in the song 'Spancil Hill' that nobody writes about. The trains still arrive, three times a day from Dublin, and the platform is quiet now, but the building itself is unchanged, and the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage protects it precisely because of what it witnessed.

Read more: Ballina Railway Station on Qualla

Image: Contributer1000 | CC0

Ballina Railway Station: Built for Wheat and Eggs

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Lucas, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Midland Great Western Railway opened the Manulla-to-Foxford line on 1 May 1868, and extended it to Ballina five years later. The branch to Killala opened on 2 January 1893 under Balfour's Light Railways Ireland Act. The whole network existed largely to move agricultural produ...

Read more: Ballina Railway Station on Qualla

Image: John Lucas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballina Railway Station: The Ballina Robbery

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0. In December 1906, after a busy market day, the booking office of Ballina station was holding more cash and cheques than usual. A few days earlier, a runaway car had crashed into the building and broken a window, which had been temporarily replaced with a wooden shutter. The thiev...

Read more: Ballina Railway Station on Qualla

Image: Gareth James | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballina Railway Station: Steel Shutters and Dispatches

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Lucas, CC BY-SA 2.0. The station was always a target during the Irish revolutionary period. In July 1920, during the War of Independence, armed men held up the night watchman at gunpoint and stole a consignment of steel shutters destined for Royal Irish Constabulary stations, presumably to deny the p...

Read more: Ballina Railway Station on Qualla

Image: John Lucas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballina Railway Station: Forty Trucks of Turf a Day

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. El Comandante assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. During the Second World War, when coal imports were impossible, the Irish state turned to peat. Bord na Móna, the state turf board, had been founded in 1934 specifically to develop the bogs as a domestic fuel source. By 1942, Mayo County Council reported that Ballina station was ...

Read more: Ballina Railway Station on Qualla

Image: No machine-readable author provided. El Comandante assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Ballina Railway Station: 150 Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Lucas, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 23 May 2023, Ballina station marked its 150th anniversary with a small ceremony. Dara Calleary, the local TD and Minister of State, was there, along with the station manager Matthew Garrett and two former station managers, Tommy May and Pat Hopkins. They cut a commemorative ca...

Read more: Ballina Railway Station on Qualla

Image: John Lucas | CC BY-SA 2.0