Trains, Turmoil & Irish Partition
A century ago this month, Ireland was partitioned. With it came new rules requiring passenger luggage and goods traffic to be inspected at 21 stations along the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Robin Morton takes up the story.
A century ago this month, Ireland was partitioned. With it came new rules requiring inspections at 21 stations along the border. Robin Morton takes up the story.
“Inevitably, the checks led to considerable delays and discomfort for passengers. At the post, passengers had to present parcels and suitcases for inspection. Goods trains were also closely checked, and this too led to long delays.”
The partition of Ireland 100 years ago in May 1921 was nobody’s first choice. Unionists had campaigned for the whole of Ireland to remain under British rule, while nationalists demanded independence. And partition was certainly not the first choice of the railways in general; the Great Northern Railway (Ireland) in particular. At a stroke, the GNR(I) found itself to be an international company, operating in two jurisdictions.
The Great Northern system criss-crossed the new frontier no fewer than 17 times, although six crossings were accounted for by the meandering Fermanagh-Monaghan boundary between Clones and Cavan.
While the route taken by the railway strayed in and out of the north, the stations on this section happened to be in the Irish Free State – a stroke of luck for the GNR(I).
The new regulations came into force in April 1923 and saw customs officers north and south examining passenger luggage and goods traffic at 21 stations. The timetable had to be rejigged to allow for delays at frontier stations; some 320 miles of the 543 miles of track operated by the Great Northern lay in Northern Ireland, the rest in the Free State.
Customs personnel
Border posts had to be built, although existing accommodation could be used in some cases. But at 14 of these 21 stations, new office accommodation for customs personnel had to be constructed – and all at the expense of the GNR(I).
The Great Northern line to Londonderry followed the west bank of the Foyle, which meant three small stations found themselves in the Free State. Trains which called at these stations had to be customs-cleared at Strabane and Porthall.
The impact on freight traffic was particularly marked, especially regarding the lucrative agriculture business. Farmers were reluctant to send their cattle and sheep to the usual mart if it was now across the frontier, as this involved considerable red tape and tariff payments. This was a major contributing factor to the closure in April 1923 of the cross-border line from Keady to Castleblayney, opened as recently as 1910.
Indeed, the ramifications extended across Ireland as the burden of working out the appropriate tariff fell on the clerks at the despatching station. If an item was being transported from Kerry to Derry, for example, the clerk in Tralee had to complete the necessary forms and charge the appropriate tariff… there is nothing new under the sun.
The railways met the challenges with ingenuity. In
the 1930s, the GNR(I) launched a summeronly ‘Bundoran Express’ from Dublin to Bundoran. It ran non-stop through Northern Ireland territory – including the county town of Enniskillen – and so avoided the necessity of customs stops.
In a similar vein, freight traffic from Free State stations such as St Johnston on the Strabane-Derry section operated on a ‘freeto-free’ basis, with wagons being sealed by customs officers in Co. Donegal and not reopened until inspected by officers in Dundalk, and vice versa.
The Great Northern was not alone in feeling the impact of the arrangements. From Carlingford Lough to Lough Foyle, several smaller railways found their systems severely affected by the new frontier, which interrupted many traditional flows of traffic. This had an inevitable economic knock-on regarding the viability of the smaller lines, and undoubtedly contributed to their decline.
On the Dundalk, Newry & Greenore Railway, customs posts were set in place at Newry and Omeath, delaying trains heading to and from the port of Greenore. The
Sligo, Leitrim & Northern Counties Railway (SLNCR) had customs posts at Belcoo and Glenfarne.
Cattle business
The complexities of a new frontier compounded the financial problems facing the SLNCR, which had been virtually bankrupt since 1890. The company had to come to terms with the new situation to maintain its primary business – the shipment of cattle from the west of Ireland to the ports of Belfast and Londonderry – but things were never the same.
The new customs arrangements also applied to the narrow gauge lines in Co. Donegal that had already borne the brunt of a campaign of sabotage and disruption mounted during the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Over a two-year period up to 1923 – and beyond, in some instances – staff were intimidated, trains held up or attacked, track blown up, bridges damaged and workshops set on fire.
The County Donegal Railway linked in with the Great Northern at Strabane – in Northern Ireland. Strabane station was less than a mile on the northern side of the border but unfortunately the County Donegal’s two lines diverged before they reached it.
This meant a UK customs post in Strabane, an Irish customs post at Lifford on the Letterkenny line, and another Irish post at Castlefinn on the line to Stranorlar. Inevitably, the checks led to considerable delays and discomfort for passengers. At the post, passengers had to present parcels and suitcases for inspection. Goods trains were also closely checked, and this too led to long delays.
Frontier issue
The situation on the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway was perhaps more acute, as the company found itself with a headquarters and works in Londonderry in the north and the rest of its 100-mile system in the Free State.
The line from Derry crossed the frontier at Bridgend, just three miles out of its Graving Dock station. A shed to allow Irish customs examinations was built at Tooban Junction in County Donegal. That said, the situation also created major opportunities for those tempted
to dabble in smuggling. During the Second World War, a lucrative business developed in border areas, and in both directions, smuggling items including butter, cigarettes and nylons.
This has long been a source of interest, and one of the displays at Whitehead Railway Museum tells visitors all about the smugglers. Their heyday was in the 1940s, when wartime food rationing was in force throughout Northern Ireland.
In some cases, people from the north took the opportunity of a cross-border visit to buy new clothes, change into them, and discard the old garments before catching the train home.
There was at least one reported case in which customs officers uncovered a contraband bottle of whiskey stowed away under the coal in the tender of a steam engine.
Mystery innovation
One innovation by the Great Northern during the war was the introduction of mystery trains from Belfast that always went to destinations in the Republic.
According to one of many of the late Tom McDevitte’s tales, they ran to a pattern, heading for the same destination on the same day each week. This meant that savvy passengers knew where the train was going, and booked the one which suited them best for a bit of smuggling. Tom told of regulars turning up at Great Victoria Street and asking the booking clerk: “Please may I have two tickets for Tuesday’s mystery train to Dundalk...”
To add to the complexities, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic found themselves in different time zones during the war. The UK added an extra hour onto the clock, so Northern Ireland used British Summer Time during the winter and Double British Summer Time in summer.
The Republic stayed with the existing arrangements. This meant train crew and passengers had to adjust their watches every time they crossed the border, and this led to many strange situations. There was the story of a schoolboy who lived in Co. Louth in the Republic but attended school in Newry in Northern Ireland. Each afternoon he would leave school at 3pm to catch the train… and arrive back home by 2.45pm.
In 1947 the Great Northern launched the ‘Enterprise Express’, a non-stop train between Belfast and Dublin. In this case, customs examinations were carried out at Great Victoria Street station in Belfast and at Amiens Street station in Dublin.
The objective was to combat the frequently huge delays at Dundalk going south and at Goraghwood going north, where stops of 45 minutes became commonplace.
One quirk was that the ‘Enterprise’ buffet car had to operate two bars, one for each jurisdiction, with prices changing at the border to reflect different duty rates.
Thus, there were two different spirits dispensers behind the bar which were locked off by a grille, and one dispenser was swapped with the other at the border.
While all the financial woes that were to beset the Irish railway companies cannot be laid at the door of Partition, there is no doubt that the new frontier was a significant factor in their decline. Today there is just one railway line left that crosses the border – the Belfast to Dublin line.
Passengers who gaze out of the window may just catch sight of white stone markers at the trackside near Kilnasaggart Bridge in south Armagh, which denote the frontier.
While the new Irish Sea border has raised all sorts of issues in 2021, customs checks on rail traffic flowing between north and south are today mercifully just a memory. ■
■ The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Charles Friel, Ian Sinclair, Michael Walsh, Tim Morton, and Tom Ferris in the compilation of this article. Sources: The Great Northern Railway of Ireland, by E M Patterson (1962); Standard Gauge Railways of the North of Ireland, by Grenfell Morton (1962).
“The complexities of a new frontier compounded the financial problems facing the SLNCR, which had been virtually bankrupt since 1890.”