The Galway-to-Clifden Railway opened in 1895, ran tourists and locals through the wild beauty of Connemara for forty years, and closed in 1935. The Midland Great Western Railway had marketed it as a tourist line, but the modest income could not survive the rise of road traffic. Its rails were lifted, its bridge over the River Corrib was scrapped and sold to a German metal company for £10, and the line became one of those Irish ghost railways whose course you can still trace in the landscape if you know what to look for. No engine from the MGWR was preserved. The whole identity of the original line, mechanically, was lost. When the heritage project began at Maam Cross in 2017, the volunteers knew that any steam locomotive running here would have to be newly built, because nothing of the original was left to restore.

The plan, when access to the Maam Cross site was secured on 14 February 2017, was straightforward in concept and complicated in practice. Restore the buildings: the water tower, the gatekeepers' hut, the goods shed, the platforms. Lay an isolated 8 km stretch of track. Build an all-weather heritage centre. Eventually, run steam trains over the line. The first phase was budgeted at about €300,000. The volunteers had hoped to mark the 125th anniversary of the original opening (1895) and 85th anniversary of the closure (1935) by running a pop-up narrow gauge demonstration in September 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic stopped that plan dead. The first section of standard Irish gauge track was laid in February 2020, just before lockdown shut everything down.

The Connemara Railway operates rolling stock in two gauges: 3-foot narrow gauge for the pop-up demonstration line that the public actually rides, and the 5-foot-3-inch broad Irish gauge that the original MGWR used. On the narrow gauge they have two Bord na Móna locomotives, the small workhorses that hauled peat in Irish bogs for most of the twentieth century. LM194 has been repainted red; LM284 still wears Bord na Móna livery. There are two coaches with limited seating, one with a small space for the guard. On the Irish gauge sits the only preserved member of Irish Rail's 2700 class, single-car unit 2751, in working order. A coach from 1903 (GS&WR 813) arrived from storage at Mullingar in August 2022. Two laminate coaches from the 1950s came in CIE black-and-tan livery in May 2023. A British Rail Mk3 sleeper carriage, built in 1983 and retired by Caledonian Sleeper in 2019, now serves as volunteer accommodation.

Maam Cross is sometimes claimed as a filming location for John Ford's 1952 The Quiet Man, the John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara romance that did more than any other film to fix the visual image of Ireland in the international imagination. The truth is more interesting. Maam Cross was apparently considered as a station location for the film. It was rejected. The nearby White O'Morn Cottage at Maam, however, was used. Whether Ford ever actually scouted the platforms or simply heard about them in passing is one of those small local debates that a heritage railway can sustain almost indefinitely. The Quiet Man association brings visitors regardless. So does the new line itself, opened in July 2025 against the odds. After the storm and the fire, the railway is doing what it had always intended to do: running trains, slowly, on a small stretch of resurrected track in a landscape that lost its rails ninety years ago.