A volunteer group in Co Galway has suffered a €50,000 blow to its efforts following a fire in a restored railway signal cabin over the weekend.
The Connemara Railway Project aims to restore a section of the long closed Galway-Clifden railway line from its base of operations at Maam Cross where it is rebuilding the original station site and a section of the train line.
On Saturday morning, as the volunteers were preparing to open for the public for a day of Santa Trains, a fire began in the site’s recently rebuilt signal cabin.
“I don’t think it has fully sunk in yet,” said project director Jim Deegan.
RM Block
“We set the fire in the [cabin’s] stove as we normally do,” he said.
“It was extremely windy and we were in and out of the cabin, the door was open. The wind made the stove white hot. Where the stove went through the panelling into the chimney, clearly the insulation didn’t stand up, and it set fire to the timber.”
The cabin consisted of a wooden super structure, containing working vintage signalling equipment and other railway memorabilia, on top of a brick substructure.
“One of our volunteers was in there and all of a sudden he heard crackling in the ceiling. I was outside and I saw smoke coming out of the slates. The fire had taken hold in the roof ... the next thing it just went up,” Mr Deegan said.
“We had fire extinguishers in the cabin and in the carriages. Santa was running around in his full gear trying to put the flames out.”
Mr Deegan said the blaze continued to worsen as the fire bridge was called. Two units responded, one from Clifden and one from Carraroe, and it took two hours to bring the flames under control.
In spite of the extensive damage to the building, which Mr Deegan described as a “huge part of the whole experience” for visitors, the volunteers are determined to restore the cabin once again.
“People came in and they pulled the levers, worked the signals, it was a really attractive part of [the visit],” Mr Deegan said.
“We have to rebuild the timber super structure completely and the roof which we intend to do as quickly as possible to have the place ready for business again in the late spring, early summer.”
“We reckon the bill will be about €50,000,” he said.
A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to help with the cost of the rebuilding and has already seen a “phenomenal” response, said Mr Deegan.
“Every smoke cloud has a silver lining,” he said.
This is the second time the signal cabin at Maam Cross has been burned down. It was previously set alight during the Civil War in 1922 and it rebuilt in 1925 by the Great Southern Railway.
It was demolished after the line was closed in 1935 and the modern day version was rebuilt by the volunteers in 2020.
Work on the Connemara Railway Project began in 2017 and its first public open days took place in spring 2024.
