On this day in 1848, County Tipperary’s first railway line was officially opened to passengers when the Limerick to Tipperary (now called Limerick Junction) line opened for business.
The line had been constructed by the Waterford and Limerick Railway Company (W&LR) and there were three stations between Limerick and Tipperary- Killonan, Pallas and Oola. There were first-, second- and third-class carriages and the fare for each was four shillings, three shillings and one shilling and eight pence respectively. The first-class carriages were built in Dublin and the others in Limerick.
On 19 May the Limerick Chronicle observed that the trains were 'daily thronged with passengers’ while the journey itself took about an hour and a half to travel the 25 miles.
Two months later, Tipperary had its second line when the Great Southern and Western Railway company (GS&W) opened the Dublin to Limerick Junction line and the first train to arrive from Dublin was greeted by hundreds of enthusiastic locals. This line was further extended to Cork in 1849 while the W&LR line was extended to Clonmel in 1852 and Waterford in 1854.
The two lines proved to be a remarkable success. In 1849, the W&LR line carried 88,000 people while the GS&W line carried a remarkable 448,000.
The photo attached to this post is of Goolds Cross in the 1910s.
Sources:
Des Marnane, “The Coming of the Railway to Tipperary in 1848” in Tipperary Historical Journal 1998, pp146-147.
Martina Clancy, “Developments in transport in eighteenth and nineteenth century limerick –The coming of the railway”
