STRABANE – A LOST RAILWAY CENTRE: KILLED BY PARTITION AND RELIGION PART ONE

Any visitor to Strabane in 2020 would struggle to believe you if you told them that Strabane was once one of the largest railway centres in Ireland until 1965. Today virtually no evidence remains of the railway station in Strabane, which has mainly become yet another supermarket car park near Railway Street. Strabane was once a major railway town served by five different railways of two different gauges, owned by four different railway companies. The geographical location of Strabane made it into an important market town over 200 years ago, linked by canal to Derry/Londonderry since 1796. The location of Strabane would attract railways in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the partition of Ireland, by 1922 Strabane now found itself divided by a new border from County Donegal on the other side of the River Foyle. This would help contribute to both its decline as a railway centre and the decision to close the last railway through Strabane in February 1965.

The first railways come to Strabane

As early as 1837 Robert Stephenson had come to Ireland to survey a proposed railway between Strabane and Londonderry, a distance of about fifteen miles. In July 1845 Parliament approved plans to build a railway from Londonderry to Enniskillen, with work starting between Strabane and Derry a few months later in October of that year. The railway from Strabane to Derry opened in April 1847. The Londonderry & Ennikillen Railway faced financial problems, which delayed extensions south of Strabane to Newtownstewart and Omagh until October 1852. From 1854 the railway from Strabane was now extended to Ennislillen and by 1859 Strabane was now finally connected to rest of the Irish railway network, allowing trains to run to Belfast by 1861 and Dublin. In