Dreams of a rail museum in Mullingar dealt a blow

The dream of providing Mullingar with a national rail museum hasn’t fully died – but it’s taken a severe knock with the decision of CIÉ to seek tenants for a part of Mullingar Railway Station originally earmarked as the potential home of the museum.
“I’m disappointed. Very,” was the reaction of Bob Morrison, one of those who has kept the dream alive over all the years since it was first mooted, in the early noughties.
CIÉ has decided to offer for lease the goods shed at the station. The 4,084 square foot building is being offered for lease as a commercial premises on the website daft.ie, and is described in the posting by CIÉ Group Property Management as being suitable for use as a light industrial unit.
The building is a protected structure, and CIÉ is offering the option of either a short-term licence, or a five-year lease with renunciation.
Interested parties are required to submit expressions of interest by the end of this month, giving the business background and company/ personal details; details of similar units they own or operate; details of the proposed use, and a business plan; specifications on design and construction, and a timeframe for delivery.
There remains in Mullingar a group of trustees from the original rail museum committee, and they haven’t yet fully relinquished the ambition of giving Mullingar a national-quality museum.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is ridiculous,” said Mr Morrison, who is one of the trustees. It’s wrong, he believes, to advertise a protected structure as being suitable for “light industry”.
“It should be conserved, in the interests of conserving our heritage,” he says.
He said that the goods store was the very first building that had been earmarked for use as part of the Mullingar transport museum, and, he said, there was support from several quarters for what the local committee was trying to do – not least from the National Museum of Ireland.
“We would have been offered the entire National Museum transport collection for the railway yard, and we also wanted to do a museum of the Viking midlands,” he said.
However, he said, a major blow had come in 2004, with the destruction of the goods platform by Irish Rail, but the hope remains that a museum could ultimately be developed at Columb Barracks.