A National Transport Museum

HydeRoad

I read some comment among various other threads here about the lack of an official transport museum in Ireland. I know we have the Howth museum, calling itself the National Transport Museum, as well as a scattering of individual preservation movements. However, when one visits Cultra in the North of Ireland, or Covent Garden in London, or even more specific museums like the Midlands Bus Museum at Wythall in Birmingham, one sees what a hole exists in our own heritage in Ireland.

Now that there is less impetus for every spare acre of land to be held aside for massive apartment developments by Friends Of Fianna Fáil, due to the recession, perhaps the opportunity is there for some site to be made available for such a venture.

I would favour Broadstone, for the main reason of it's immediate accessibility to the city centre, and the opportunity it would provide to open up the rather neglected northside of the city to a bit of tourist traffic. Added to that of course, it's rich transport background, and the large amount of land available for a variety of buildings and storage. The old MGWR headquarters form an excellent dignified centrepiece, suitable for exhibition, library, archive and facilities, with the long engine sheds behind ideal for dividing between rail, road and other categories of interest. There is ample outdoor space for open days, car parking, operating areas, and all kinds of features, as well as that fine forecourt on the hill, which could be really cleaned up and turned into a feature area.

I am dismayed to see Pat Wallace would suggest there is 'no need' for a transport museum. What, grubby old trains and buses? The museum would be so much more, are people so narrow minded? The story of transportation in Ireland is fascinating, and strangely enough, this tiny little country managed to be at the forefront of so many developments in technology and expertise down the years. History has so much to teach us.

While enthusiast involvement is necessary, it would seem that enthusiast rivalry is what has crippled every honest attempt to revive transport history in this country. A credible transport museum would have to be run on a professional basis, by business minded people, with advice from knowledgeable historians and archivists and enthusiasts, and with a very strong view of what it wants to be and wants to do, with scope for development and new ideas as they emerge.

Having said all that, living as we do in a Fianna Fáil corrupted country, where everything is about the pound, shilling and penny, and where who you are and who you know is all that matters, and where heritage, unless it is the Famine or 1916, is snubbed or laughed at, is such an idea as a credible transport museum doomed to be a figment of the imagination?

My head bursts with ideas for how such a thing might be conceived and operated, and yet there is no single group of people with whom I might involve myself, who might have the collective inspiration or ability to carry out such a thing. There are too many dreamers, who would fill a museum full of junk and scrap, who would have no notion of presenting history in an exciting and educational way to ordinary people, or who would have any insight into the commercial realities of managing such a large institution and differentiating between fantasy and reality.

Is it within the bounds of possibility to gather together the beginnings of such a movement, while keeping at bay the selfish and quarrelsome element that has been the ruin of every other preservation movement in the country?

Judgement Day

You missed the boat I'm afraid. Broadstone was suggested long before the Celtic tiger when property prices were low - there was no interest then by officialdom and I can confidently say there will be no interest now. Why do you think the museum in Howth is still in a converted hay barn?

Having been involved in various preserved railway projects since the early 1980s I can assure you that it is the lack of official support (financial/technical and the cutting through red tape and bull****) that has held preservation back in the Republic. If it wasn't for enthusiasts there would have been nothing saved whatsoever - even the few locos that CIE plinthed were put there by pressure from the railway enthusiast fraternity in the early 1960s.

While Cultra is excellent, as far as it goes, it suffers from the blinkered Pat Wallace approach and no planning for the future has been made, they are a commercial disaster funded by the UK government. Imagine a similar museum on the UK mainland that have not even managed to produce a guidebook in almost 50 years of existence. The museum was built to hold the existing collection from Witham Street with no allowance for anything else - diesel locomotives etc. Case in point being the former NIR railbus being farmed out to Downpatrick - where it will probably end up torched - and the various pioneer mainline diesel equipment left to rot at Inchicore and elsewhere. They have not lived up to the high standards of their founders who only had the kip that was Witham Street to run their museum in.

There is still a vast amount of railway and other equipment available for a National Museum but with xxxxxxxxxtes like Pat Wallace (National Museum), Minister John "Whose door is always open ...except when you need to see him"Gormley, and Gillian "TSB" Bowler at Failte Ireland there is absolutely no hope of anything happening. If you think a new rainbow coalition of FG/Labour will be any different you're living in cloud cuckoo land. :mad:

lostexpectation

do we have an industrial heritage museum?

Judgement Day

NO.

L1011

Broadstone would be almost exactly like the Dutch railway museum - superfluous non-city centre terminus that closed in the 1950s. Except NS kept the track to it intact to bring stock in and now run tourist trains from Utrecht Central to it...

Judgement Day

Yes - I note according to Wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlands_Spoorwegmuseum

that the embryonic collection was established as far back as 1927 - means it survived WWII as well - it would make you weep.

L1011

Not much of it is pre-WWII! Some bits and pieces, probably more than we have, though.

Was there in March, has worse translations of signs / booklets / etc to English than most museums here have to French/German/Italian. Luckily I have a bit of Dutch...

Run_to_da_hills

NS were very similar to Ireland in that they had rolling stock that were unique to that country apart from some of the French designed Alstohm class 1300 and 1700 Class locos

Its such a shame that this country has such little to offer on its unique railway heritage.

Judgement Day

Just came across this link to a really nice film about the Hill of Howth tram. Filmed sometime in the late 1950s it runs to 22 minutes in colour and narrated by Cyril Cusack. It is possible to download it too!

http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/PY/261/see-the-film-once_upon_a_tram


The Hill of Howth tram was one of three must sees for visitors to Dublin along with the Nelson Pillar and Dublin Zoo. The short sighted fools who allowed its closure should have been strung up but the good news is that their descendants are still running the State (the Andrews brothers for starters) and of course Fianna Fail who presided over the destruction of much of the railway network with that useless pxxxk - Erskine Childers and his henchman Todd Andrews. :mad:

DRO_MAD

Irish Rail and Transport Foundation, Ltd

• website: http://www.irtf-ie.org/
• address: PO Box 1459, New Rochelle, NY 10802-1459

I thought this crowd were going to start a National Railway Museum - they were linked to the IE Heritage Office - say no more! Needless to say the website is defunct and one wonders what happened to the donations they solicited? Anybody receive funding from them?

corktina

i dont think there is sufficent scope for a Railway or any other single-interest museum in Ireland. |An expanded National Museum catering fro all aspects of irish life and history would be a more rational idea with maybe one Bus and a diesel loco (too late to include steam I guess) and a comprehensive interpretive display together with similar displays pro-rata for other aspects such as the Turf Board, hydro-electric power, canals, turnpike roads, the Irish Army, our near-extinct fishing industry, lighthouses etc etc...

(I have my hand up here, never been to the Museum in Dublin...dont even know its right name...)

ardmacha

There may be scope of a transport museum in Ireland, but there is probably not scope for two. The Witham st collection now in Cultra can form the basis of a good museum, a small pooling of resources by both jurisdictions could make it a good effort. Perhaps a new site is needed, somewhere like Newry in NI but easily accessible and near major road and rail links.

Judgement Day

Following a piece in the Irish Times on the 29th July I thought it was time to revisit this thread. While searching for the original thread I found this more recent one (with pics) of a visit to 'The National Transport Museum' at Howth: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=73461868 Some nice pics which show the quality of the restored vehicles and the museum barn that they are displayed in.

Here is the piece from the IT - I nearly choked on my cornflakes with laughter as the writer clearly has zero knowledge of what has happened in Ireland over the last 50+ years. She seems well intentioned so perhaps she will do a follow-up piece - including interviews with Leo Varadkar and Jimmy Deenihan and some of the wasters in Failte Ireland.

The Irish Times - Friday, July 29, 2011
Germany shows how to do a national science museum

The success of the Deutsches Museum highlights the strong need for an Irish equivalent to showcase our scientific and technological achievements, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

THE DEUTSCHES Museum (www.deutsches- museum.de/en/), Germany’s expansive science and technology museum in Munich, is in John Graham-Cumming’s handy book for technophiles, The Geek Atlas, so there was no question that a visit to the city would demand a day set aside for its exploration.

Not just to cross it off the list – though some consider The Geek Atlas to be the techie equivalent of a field guide to birdwatchers, and delight in ticking off another conquest. But I’d heard several enthusiastic reports of this museum and was eager to see it.

The 47,000sq m (56,212sq yd) museum does not disappoint. That hundreds of other people, including a large army of children of all ages, felt the same, was apparent on arrival, with queues so long at the two entry cashiers that the museum has set up a third in a trailer in the entry courtyard.

But this isn’t a museum aimed significantly at children. And that’s a compliment and testimony to great museum design.The museum is aimed at adults, but kids have no problem being drawn into what are often quite complex exhibits.

In part that is because the museum is full of real things – wonderful things like ships and boats, cars and planes, engines and microscopes, computers, rockets and robots.

The first room on entry is full of an entire sailing ship, sails unfurled, built in the 1800s, cut away so that you can view the interior. There is an entire U-boat, also cut away. There is an Irish currach hanging on a wall and other sailing vessels from around the world.

Similarly, a vast floor upstairs is full of real planes and flying machines. Other rooms are packed with bits of early electronic generators. There are endless motors. The computing section – which was partly mothballed for renovations – had gadgets galore, including a fleet of calculating machines from across history as well as a 1950s vacuum tube-based early computer from computing pioneer Konrad Zuse.

The space exploration section has a collection of space suits, a moon rover, pieces of rocket engines, and detailed explanations of how rocket fuel combusts. One quintessentially German bit shows the kind of thing we really all want to know about: a commode on the international space station with an explanation of all the parts (oh, so that’s how they go in zero gravity!). And who knew that a plastic urine collector for the Apollo astronauts was a special area of manufacture for the giant white goods company Whirlpool (the kind of precise detail that delights at this museum)?

There are plenty of explanations and interactive exhibits to let visitors understand how things work, as well as live demonstrations that captivated children. But every item on display also has a detailed explanation (usually in English too), as well as – so German! – exact technical specifications. So while the kids might enjoy looking into the dozens of planes or cut-away car engines, an adult engineer would be in heaven for an hour or two, in these sections alone.

This is a museum that is full of real objects and takes an unapologetically strong engineering and hard science approach, rather than a highly simplified “how things work” view of science based on models or virtual exhibits. As a matter of fact, there are very few virtual, touchscreen-based exhibits at all, except in the fascinating section on nanotechnology, where they are well utilised.

It’s a serious argument for low tech. Too often, tech museums are full of interactive exhibits for kids that they mostly just bash around like toys with little interest in the content. And they are, annoyingly, so often not working in the first place.

Three things really stood out for me at the end of a too-short day at the Deutsches Museum, where whole sections had to be left unexplored, and that’s even without going to its two – two! – adjunct museums in Munich, one highlighting flight (I guess three floors at the main museum are not enough) and the other, land transport.

First, was how well the museum works in lively biographies of real, international scientists in every section, so that you never forget that behind every invention lie real people, with a passion for science.

Second – and connected – was how well a museum like this can showcase national capabilities in science, engineering and technology. Of course, Germany has a long history in engineering and technical innovation, but the way in which exhibits are designed must inspire many German kids to see such areas as exciting and inviting as a personal career.

Finally, it showed how desperately Ireland needs a proper science and technology museum and how it should not be something designed “for kids” but for everyone.

If Ireland wants and needs children to be inspired by research and innovation, to fall in love with working in science, engineering and technology, then it needs such places; but we all need to celebrate national and international scientific accomplishment, and to learn those great stories.

How ironic to go to Germany’s national museum (and how telling about attitudes to science here that a museum about science and engineering is simply called “The German Museum”) to learn about the Earl of Rosse’s pioneering 1845 telescope, or to discover in an exhibit about the wave energy-based Wells turbine that it is named for its inventor, Prof Alan Wells of Queens University.

Plans for a science museum have been repeatedly shelved by the Irish government. At the moment, Trinity College’s Science Gallery tackles the subject, but it is small and its thought-provoking, often quirky exhibits aren’t intended to have the role of a national science museum.

While we wait to see if a long-promised science and technology museum ever returns to the national agenda, I’d highly recommend a visit to the Deutsches Museum. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2011/0729/1224301557503.html

playbus

Now, in 2017, Broadstone might just be available soon, as Bus Eireann faces closure or being sold off. The first thing any new owner will do is to build a new maintenance depot elsewhere, freeing up Broadstone as a perfect Transport Museum location.