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The Mid-Antrim Narrow Gauge

Category: Transport

This is a new edition of Dr EM Patterson's book The Ballymena Lines, originally published in 1968 and is a companion volume to The Ballycastle Railway by the same author, reissued in 2006.

County Antrim was the cradle of the Irish narrow gauge railways and this updated edition covers the Ballymena, Cushendal and Red Bay Railway, the Ballymena and Larne Railway, the NCC and the various industrial lines that operated, such as the Glenariff Railway, the Carnlough Mineral Railway and the British Aluminium lines at Larne.
A detailed itinerary taking you over what remains of the railway in 2007 provides a useful and interesting addition to the 1968 book.  

With additional material by Norman Johnston.

The Author

Dr EM Patterson, BSc, MSc, DSc, MPhil, MRIA, FRSE was born at Bangor, Co Down, in 1920 and educated at Bangor Grammar School and The Queen’s University, Belfast. He was trained as a geologist but in 1941 he moved to Scotland to take up employment as a research chemist at ICI (Explosives) at Ardeer, Ayrshire. His interest in geology continued to flourish and in 1947 he moved to St Andrews University where he lectured in the Department of Geology and Mineralogy. In 1953 he married Violet Kirk (neé Adams), a Queen’s graduate, and returned to ICI at Ardeer the following year, working there until his retirement in 1981.

In Ireland his focus of interest was the railways in the north of the island. He wrote nine books, covering seven of the narrow gauge lines (two in this book, formerly published as The Ballymena Lines), as well as The Great Northern Railway of Ireland and The Belfast and County Down Railway (two books). An updated edition of The Clogher Valley Railway, with additional text, was published by Colourpoint Books in 2004 and a similarly updated version of The Ballycastle Railway in 2006. His last book was The Castlederg and Victoria Bridge Tramway (Colourpoint 1998), published just after his death. The posthumous award of MPhil in 1997 by The Queen’s University was for his work on the industrial archaeology of gunpowder manufacture.

 ©2008 Colourpoint Books