Overview
The Ballycastle Railway was a 3 ft (914 mm) narrow-gauge line that ran for about 17 miles (27 km) between the inland market town of Ballymoney and the seaside town of Ballycastle from 1880 until 1950. It is gone now, the rails lifted long ago, but its course is still legible across north Antrim: a tunnel, a four-arch viaduct, a scatter of old station houses and a small bridge under the most photographed trees in Northern Ireland. Of all of it, the one remnant genuinely worth going out of your way for is the railway bridge at the Dark Hedges, which you can fold into a visit to the avenue itself.
A narrow-gauge line, 1880–1950
The railway was authorised by the Ballycastle Railway Act 1878 and built by the contractors Butler and Fry between 1879 and 1880, with traffic starting in October 1880. The narrow 3 ft gauge was a money-saver: it let the line curve through river valleys without the heavy earthworks a standard-gauge route would have needed. At Ballymoney it met the broad-gauge main line to Derry, which is what made it useful, linking the coast to the rest of the network.
Trains ran via Dervock, Stranocum, Gracehill, Armoy and Capecastle, three return journeys a day, the trip taking the best part of an hour. At its peak the line carried more than 85,000 passengers a year, many of them crowds heading for Ballycastle’s Lammas Fair, the old August horse-and-sheep fair the railway did much to fill. Steam came first from Black Hawthorn 0-6-0ST locomotives, with Kitson 4-4-2T engines added in 1908 and LMS corridor carriages brought over from the Ballymena and Larne line in 1933.
It was never very profitable. The line closed in 1924, was rescued by the Northern Counties Committee and reopened the same year, then finally shut for good as road transport took over: the last train left Ballycastle on 2 July 1950. The only original Ballycastle carriage to survive was bought by the Donegal Railway and is now in its museum collection.
What still survives
By the engineers’ own reckoning the line had only two structures of note, and both are still there. At Capecastle there is a short, straight tunnel of about 66 yards; entering Ballycastle, the line crossed the Glentow River on a stone viaduct of four arches. The summit of the whole route, all of 319 ft, sat between Armoy and Capecastle, which tells you how gentle the country was.
The remnant most people actually see is the small stone bridge that carried the line under Bregagh Road at the Dark Hedges near Armoy – the beech avenue that played the Kingsroad in Game of Thrones. Several of the original station buildings, at Dervock, Stranocum, Gracehill and Capecastle, also survive, now mostly in private hands, so look but don’t intrude.
One honest caveat: despite a long-running proposal to turn the trackbed into a ‘Greenway of Thrones’ walking and cycling route, that greenway does not exist yet. There is no continuous waymarked path along the old line. The remains are scattered, some on private land, and best treated as points to seek out rather than a single walk to follow end to end.
Practical information
- Getting there: Ballymoney has regular Translink rail and bus services; Ballycastle is reached by bus from Belfast or by car on the coast road.
- The Dark Hedges: parking at the avenue is limited and a car is realistically the only way to reach it; go early to beat the coach crowds.
- Learn more: the Ballycastle Museum, in the 18th-century courthouse on Castle Street, covers the folk history of the Glens, and the town’s heritage trail ties the local sites together.
If you only chase one piece of the old line, make it the Dark Hedges: see the avenue, then look for the railway bridge beneath Bregagh Road that almost nobody photographing the trees ever notices.