Hugh Dougherty visits the Fry Model Railway Exhibition at Malahide in
Dublin.
Model trains have firmly established themselves on the Dublin
tourist track at Malahide, where the Fry Model Railway draws the crowds
who come to see Ireland's railway heritage and history in miniature.
Housed in a purpose-built 12 by 24 metres building at Malahide Castle,
the model is the world's largest working collection of model trains, all
painstakingly accurate, seven millimetres to the foot scale versions of
Irish steam and diesel locomotives as well as railcars.
You can stand at the lineside and marvel at a model of the first train
to run in Ireland, in 1834 on the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, making its
steady way along the tracks, while, on another track a sky-blue Great Northern
Railway of Ireland locomotive sweeps past with the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise
express of 1949.
Meanwhile, a present-day Iarnrod Éireann Inter City express thunders
by behind its diesel loco, while a DART train shuttles in and out of its
stations.
Nor have the fabled narrow gauge lines of yesteryear been forgotten,
as a tiny Cavan & Leitrim loco, pulling coaches that might have come out
of the Wild West, chugs over a viaduct, as its cowcatcher probes its way
along the miniature track.
There are still the working models of trams, from Dublin, Cork and the
Hill of Howth to savour, not forgetting the working buses on the streets
round Dublin's Heuston Station, plus the working Guinness steam barge on
the layout's canal system.
But this is no big train set. Instead, it's a work of art, the artist
in question being the late Cyril Fry, a railway engineer with CIE, who,
as a sort of busman's holiday, built exact scale replicas of Irish railway
stock as a relaxation. There was no part of the Irish railway system that
Fry didn't visit, photograph and build in model form.
The whole, which even included a working model of the Ballybunnion Lartigue
monorail, was operated on a large layout in his Dublin home, and when Fry
died, his widow offered the unique collection to the nation.
Recognising the value, Dublin Tourism took on the task of building the
line's new home at Malahide, incorporating parts of the original model into
today's system, overhauling the models and building new ones to the same
Fry standards.
If you're looking for something different to do on a trip to Dublin,
then the Fry Model Railway is one railway journey you should take.
Of course, you can take the real thing in the shape of the DART up to
Malahide station and walk through the pleasant woods of Malahide Castle
estate to reach this miniature fantasy land, where the narrow gauge still
runs, and where Maeve of the Great Southern Railway still hauls her steam-age,
crack Dublin-Cork express, and always arrives right on time.
This is one train you can't afford to miss. The Fry Model Railway is
open all year round. Hours vary from October to March. For full details,
ring 00 353 1 846 3779.
