Saturday 12th August 2023, 1:30pm
Venue: Donegal Railway Museum
Donegal Railway Museum is delighted to welcome transport journalist Hugh Dougherty. Hugh got to know the CDR buses, management and crews very well while on holidays in Donegal as a teenager in the 1960s. He felt that the story of the CDR, after the railway closed, should be told, and wrote ‘The Bus Services of the County Donegal Railways’, published in 1973 by Transport Research Associates of Dublin, and now long out of print. His new book, ‘County Donegal Railways Bus Services’, published this summer, tells the story of the buses in more detail as the result of new research by Hugh.
A proud member of the Glasgow-Donegal diaspora, Hugh contributes to transport magazines and local and national media, including the Irish papers in Scotland. As a father of four grown-up children and a grandfather for five, he lives with his wife, Patricia, who has suffered, patiently, for the last 48 years, from his life-long fascination with all things CDR, including building a working, 4mm scale model of the railway, and its buses(!), in their Glasgow home.
Hugh promises a lively talk on the CDR buses, covering much more than just the vehicles and routes themselves, telling, as he does in his new book, of the crews who ran them, the passengers they carried, the very different world from today’s Donegal that they ran in, and what it was like to travel on a bus owned and proudly operated by the County Donegal Railways Joint Committee, until it was taken over by Coras Iompair Eireann. During those post-railway years, from 1960 to 1971, the fiercely-independent CDR still thought of itself as a railway company, even if it didn’t have a train! It’s a story worth the telling.
As a special treat, we have the only surviving CDR Bus coming all the way from Dublin, courtesy of Ian Molly, which will be on show that day, outside the museum.
This lecture will also be streamed live on our Facebook and YouTube Channel. For more information contact [email protected]
