The Sligo, Leitrim & Northern Counties Railway Cattle to the markets, and more
In the years after the division of Ireland in 1922, railways that crossed the border between Northern Ireland and Éire were seen to be politically ‘too difficult’ and thus remained for over three decades as independent companies.Colin Boocock describes one such line that appeared to thrive on moving cross-border cattle and freight. All photographs by the author.
Stretch your mind and imagine a broad gauge railway operating over 48 miles in two countries, that earns its revenue from cattle trains and freight, that makes use of a small railbus and a railcar for just three return passenger trains a day, and runs a fourth passenger service in one direction only in the form of the last steam-hauled mixed train in the British Isles. That was the Sligo, Leitrim & Northern Counties Railway (SL&NCR) until it closed in 1957.
The cattle would be loaded into wagons at diverse locations in the west of Ireland and then be brought to a hub at Collooney, with other wagons being loaded there. Then they would be formed into goods trains and trundled east across the border as far as Enniskillen, and from there the wagons would disperse again in Great Northern Railway freight trains, aiming at getting the cattle to markets in the North. Collooney then was a village of just 600 residents, yet it had three stations and was judged to be the smallest place in the British Isles with that facility. This was due to an accident of railway geography in that, while the main line from Dublin passed through the village, that from the south-west and Galway missed the village on the west side, as did the Enniskillen line on the east – the lines converged some distance north of the village, hence the need for a station on each line. The outer routes were linked by a chord line from the Galway line to the SL&NCR that passed under the Dublin line and provided a direct way to get traffic from west to east. Today, Collooney has grown to 1,600 people who now have just one station, on the Dublin-Sligo main line, because the other routes are closed.
The author first experienced the SL&NCR in 1956 when he and his friend Mark arrived by a Great Northern Railway train at the Northern Irish town of Enniskillen, aiming to get to Sligo in the Republic in time for a l
