Commuting is a frustrating business at the best of times. Trains get delayed, get crowded, get cancelled. But when you arrive at the station only to find that the platform itself has disappeared – well, that’s when the wheels really come off your working day.
The two gentlemen in our photograph appear to illustrate the opposite ends of the waiting-for-a-train spectrum. While the man on the right leans irritably outward to see if he can spot an approaching locomotive, his companion stands patiently by, eyes resolutely lowered, preferring not to look. They are (right) Mr Ned O'Rourke and (left) Mr Paddy Whelan, members of the Monasterevin Railway Station Action Committee.
Formed in 1995 with the aim of re-opening the station at Monasterevin in Co Kildare, which had been closed almost two decades earlier in order to speed up the journey of an express train from Dublin to Galway, the group delivered a truckload of statistics, complaints and protests to the operators of the railway, Iarnród Éireann.
Where somebody had the brilliant idea of pulling the rug – sorry, platform – from under the campaign. That'll shut them up for once and for all, they thought. But they didn't know Mr O'Rourke. "They told me the removal of the platform was necessary to allow a maintenance machine to operate," he informed The Irish Times, wryly adding: "When I asked him how this machine operated in other stations where the platforms still exist, he gave me a very vague reply."
Our photograph tells a cheerless story. Those empty rails extending eerily into the misty distance; the abandoned station, boarded up and scribbled on; above all, that dispiriting stretch of rubble and weeds where the platform ought to be.
It carries a whiff of the Wild West, never mind deepest Kildare. Thanks to the determination of the action group, however, this western has a happy ending: Monasterevin station re-opened in 2001, carrying passengers to and from Portlaoise – if not the world.