A quiet man

The name Denis Grimshaw will mean nothing to most people who will read this post, but a quiet man from the Ormeau Road made an immeasurable contribution to keeping the lights on at Northern Ireland Railways.

The news of his death after many years ill with dementia last week, only eight days after his wife, came to mind as I attended the formal opening of York Street station on Monday.

Yorkgate station, its immediate predecessor which will be demolished on Monday, was part of Denis’s legacy, forming part of the Cross-Harbour bridge project that linked passenger services from the former NCC to the former GNR and BCDR lines.  A station he observed in 1994 could only have a lifetime of about 30 years, as was noted this morning at his funeral.

The new Great Victoria Street station, connecting the Bangor and Larne lines to the city centre for the first time, was the last of his projects with NIR.  Tucked behind a car park which would have been too much trouble to attempt to obtain via a compulsory purchase order and on top of a few bus stands in the Europa Buscentre, by midnight on Friday the echo of the detonators which will mark the departure of the last train will have gone silent, and it will be in the hands of the demolition contractors.

It’s easy to say that the cross-harbour bridge should have been double track, and that NIR should have built a larger station at Yorkgate (incidentally, like its predecessor York Road, sited in the 300s of York Street).  Far too easy to say that the step-free access to the station was unacceptably steep.  Similarly, Great Victoria Street is a very tight site

But it kept the lights on.

Without Denis and his colleagues fighting for the cross-harbour bridge, the Larne line might not have been here today.

Without Denis and his colleagues fighting to build Great Victoria Street, Grand Central would not even be on the agenda.

The 1990s were too much a time of making do on NIR because the better we needed and still need today was beyond the funding which could be obtained.  Repurchasing Waterside station was an impossibility.  80 class and 450 class trains were showing the age of their mechanical equipment (the 450 class bodies were built in 1984-86 but the engines were 20 years older).  The cross-border upgrade never quite delivered what was advertised.  Some things never change, but because Denis and others stuck at it, NIR is still here, and once funding was finally offered to enhance services, we ended up with the meteoric rise in train passenger journeys we saw before COVID.

Denis’s legacy is timebound, yet it is eternal.  Yorkgate is gone.  Great Victoria Street is going.  The De Dietrichs will go in a few years.  All though are being superseded by something better, and without people like Denis they wouldn’t be there to supersede.

Whether you join us on the 11.32 from Great Victoria Street to Bangor this Friday or not, if you’re a train passenger, raise your glass to a man who worked hard to make sure that the trains are still here.