Broadstone terminus
Broadstone
terminus
In Brief
In Lotus Eaters Bloom imagines that the couple leaving the Grosvenor Hotel are "Off to the country: Broadstone probably," and in Wandering Rocks Mr. Dudley White stands on Array Quay "undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus." Both passages refer to a railway station in the northwest part of inner Dublin, at the top of Constitution Hill between Smithfield and Phibsborough. In 1904 it served as the terminus, or endpoint, of the Midland Great Western Railway Company, whose trains went to the west of Ireland.
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In the 1840s the MGWR purchased the Royal Canal so that it
could build a railway line along it to Mullingar and from
there to Galway. For its Dublin terminus, the MGWR chose land
beside a "harbour" at the end of a southerly spur of the canal
that ran parallel to the Phibsborough Road. The canal
extension allowed goods to be offloaded from ships and then
carried to transatlantic ships in the west. The company
commissioned Irish architect John Skipton Mulvany to design a
monumental station for the site, whose name refers not to the
building's granite blocks but to the nearby passage of the
Finglas Road over the Bradogue River. (Bradóg means
"young salmon" in Irish, and the Norse word steyn
probably first referred to a simple stone bridge.) The station
opened for business in 1850 and was extensively remodeled in
1861. Starting in 1878 all the MGWR's trains were constructed
in workshops located just south and west of it.
An article on the Archiseek website documents the
magnificence achieved in the 1861 renovations by quoting from
a story in the Freeman's
Journal: "Today or tomorrow the alterations which
have been for some months in course of preparation, come into
effect at Broadstone Terminus. To avoid the inconvenience and
possible dangers of changing rails as hitherto in leaving or
arriving the trains were compelled to do, the platforms have
been altered from one side of the building to the other. The
south-west will, in future, be the departure side, the
north-east the arrival; the travellers leaving Dublin passing
the terminus and reaching the platform by a handsome collonade
[sic] supported by metal pillars, and through a
spacious ticket office. On this the departure platform will
now be found with waiting rooms...opening on a corridor 300
feet in length.
"On the opposite side the arrival platform has now been
formed. It opens on a magnificent collonade, about fifty feet
in width by 600 feet in length. This is appropriated to
vehicles of every description, which can leave its inclosure
with the utmost celerity....The interior of the station is
being further beautified by the painting in bright colours of
the roof, pillars, and delicate iron work of the spacious and
graceful shed—the building, altogether, presenting a railway
terminus in every way worthy of a great and enterprising
company."
In the 1920s the MGWR combined with the Great Southern and
Western Railway, whose terminus was Kingsbridge Station, to
form the Great Southern Railway. This consolidation and the
filling in of the canal spur, which had been happening in
stages for decades, made the Broadstone station largely
useless. In 1937 it was closed to passenger traffic and became
a maintenance depot, and in 1961 it closed altogether. Today
the building serves as the headquarters and garage of Bus
Éireann, whose long-distance coaches connect to central Dublin
via a Luas tram stop and a Dublin Bus depot next door. For
many decades the Victorian glory of the station steadily
decayed, but in 2021 Dublin Bus completed a €15 million
restoration and redevelopment.
