I started to help after school, now I’m at it nearly 20 years
Content assistant Robert Gardiner (38) lives in Ballygowan with his three beagles and is chair of Downpatrick and County Down Railway. He says:
Ihave always had an interest in railways. I grew up beside the closed Comber railway line and always thought it was a shame that it was closed to the public. Unfortunately that is now the case for a lot of our railway heritage.
We also had a caravan up in Portrush beside the railway line there, and so I would hear the horn blowing and the distinctive clickety-clack of the incoming carriage, and there was something magical about that.
When we were kids on holidays we also got to ride on the train as a treat. There was the remains of an old railway carriage a couple of fields away behind our house and I was fascinated by it.
I discovered Downpatrick and County Down Railway as a teenager following a news report by the BBC.
I had never heard of it before, I must admit, so I went down exploring one day in 1997 and went back for Easter. It was a short run, not even a mile up to what’s known as the viking King Magnus’s burial mound.
I was shown around the workshops by one of the volunteers, Barney Graham, who taught me about some of the fantastic woodwork and restoration work going on there in turning things like the carriage into gleaming restored beauties.
My dad has always been a passionate woodworker and I had picked up that passion and those skills, so it was naturally very appealing to me to get involved. Barney suggested volunteering and I went down to help over summer between school and university, thinking that would be that. Now I’ve ended up volunteering for almost 20 years.
These days, I do quite a lot of things. On running days I’m usually booked as a guard on the train (the one with the flag), but outside that I’m usually involved in a lot of restoration work and board meetings in my role as chair. I’m currently working on a 1950s carriage. There are probably around a dozen carriages and seven diesel and three steam locomotives there, so there is a lot to be done.
The place is very much a hobby for me, but we could do with more volunteers, especially individuals with woodworking and metal skills to help restore our collection.
We also want people interested in learning how to operate the railway. You don’t even need to be that passionate about railways.
It’s for those with an interest in history, transport, design, lots of different things.” Northern Ireland is very much behind England, for example, in terms of people volunteering for this sort of project.
Quite a good number of visitors assume we’re paid staff, or get funding from Stormont, but we aren’t and we don’t.
We’re just average Joe Bloggs from all walks of life who want to restore a little bit of what was taken away in the 1950s.
In all walks of life, we often hear people say the following: ‘Someone should do something about that.’ Well, my contention is that you are someone and you can do something about that.”