Building the Great Northern Railway (Ireland): Design, Communication and Construction

Abstract

On Wednesday 17 December 1834 the first passenger railway line in Ireland opened. Over the next four decades thousands of miles of railway lines were constructed across the island, creating an expansive network of connectivity. From the 1920s onward many of these lines closed, leaving remains of stations, platforms, sheds, signal cabins and residences. For the former Great Northern Railway (Ireland) evocative synchronisation in its architectural style across all these buildings in yellow, red and blue brickwork, moulded bargeboards, and iron platform canopies. This thesis seeks to uncover the process by which these structures came to be: who designed them, how, what are they made from, who constructed them and, ultimately, how did they sit within their local, national and international landscapes. The thesis is divided into three parts in order to facilitate this investigation. The first section, Design, examines the style of the GNR buildings within their nineteenth-century architectural context, exploring the influences and eclectic methods of the buildings? creation. The second section, Communication, takes a deep-dive into the people responsible for their design and how they effectively used the language of engineering and architectural draughtsmanship to communicate these designs. Section three, Construction, deals with the business of architecture. The materials used to realise the GNR?s characteristic architectural style have been scrutinised brick-by-brick demonstrating how they were at the genesis of design development. The tendering and contracting process is then investigated to understand the physical manifestation of how these buildings came to be and the hands who built them. This thesis will demonstrate how the creation of the GNR?s polychromatic brick-brand of architecture was one of enormous collaboration made possible by the construction, manufacturing and technological atmosphere of the late-nineteenth century. By doing so, an understanding of the building of the Great Northern Railway (Ireland) is developed, from the imagination of its engineer-in-chief to the hand of the bricklayer.