Galway train station, Ceannt Station

Platforms and what is inside

There are two platforms. Platform 1 is the long one, used by trains arriving from and departing for Dublin Heuston. Platform 2 is much shorter, reached only by walking through Platform 1, and it is where the Limerick services leave from. If you are running for a Limerick train, head down Platform 1 and keep going.

Inside the building are ticket machines and a booking office, heated waiting rooms, toilets, a café run by Starbucks, vending machines and a telephone box. The station doubles as the Bus Éireann depot for the city, which is why so many buses line the square outside.

Why the station is on Eyre Square at all

The railway company first meant to stop the line at Renmore, on the far side of Lough Atalia. A local priest, Father Peter Daly, persuaded them to bridge the lough and bring the trains right to the square. The Lough Atalia bridge was designed by George Willoughby Hemans, engineer in chief of the Midland Great Western Railway, with iron castings from James Stephens Iron Works engineered by C. W. Stephens in 1851.

The station opened on 1 August 1851 to a design by John Skipton Mulvany, who also drew the hotel next door, opened a year later and now the Hardiman. The original roof was the work of the iron founder Richard Turner. From that summer Galway was the western end of the Midland Great Western, with a direct main line to Broadstone in Dublin.

The lines that came and went

As the century went on, Galway became a railhead for the whole province. Athenry, a few miles east, turned into a junction: from 1869 it gave Galway a link to Ennis, Limerick and the south, and from 1894 a link to Sligo and the north. In 1895 the company opened its extension west from Galway to Clifden.

Road competition in the twentieth century undid most of that. The Great Southern Railways closed the Clifden branch in 1935, and in the 1970s Córas Iompair Éireann took passenger trains off the Sligo to Athenry to Ennis line, then freight as well. Part of that route has since reopened as the Western Rail Corridor, which is why Athenry and Limerick trains run from Platform 2 today.

Plans for the station quarter

In 2007 CIÉ proposed a billion-euro Ceannt Station Quarter, with offices, a hotel, four rail platforms, 24 bus bays, 500 car spaces and 300 cycle spaces. The project was abandoned by 2012. Smaller sums followed: about a million euro in 2013 for a bus, rail and taxi interchange with widened footpaths and proper bus bays, design money for a seated waiting area and retail units, and a further 600,000 euro in 2014.

A new scheme called Augustine Hill, covering an eight-acre site around the station, went to the city council in 2020 and was conditionally approved. The details of what gets built, and when, are still a matter for the planning process.

Getting to the station on foot

Everything in the old city is walkable from the platforms. Eyre Square is at the door; Shop Street and William Street begin at the square's south-west corner; the Spanish Arch and the river are about fifteen minutes away downhill. The model on this page shows the square and the streets around it, and every shop and café on them has its own page with directions from wherever you are standing.