Foyle Road stained glass windows preserved in Enniskillen museum

Two stained glass windows that once adorned the doors of the Great Northern Railway Ireland station on Foyle Road prior to its closure in 1965 have turned up in Fermanagh.

The Headhunters Barber Shop and Railway Museum, a quirky tourist attraction in the heart of the central island of Enniskillen, wired off Jim to let him know it was in possession of the resplendent stained glass panels.

“These are the preserved stain glass windows from when the station closed in 1965,” Jim explained.

“These two surviving windows have been donated to the Headhunters Railway Museum in Enniskillen.”

‘He viewed the Derry railway lines with the dead eye of an undertaker’

The windows bear the GNR initials in stained glass. Jim sent the ‘Journal’ photographs of how they look now and how they would have looked before the Foyle Road station closed 56 years ago this February.

The Headhunters museum reached out to Jim as a result of his research on the story of the Foyle Road and the GNR line to Strabane, which has been published on the Disused Stations website.

The station once served what began life as the Londonderry and Enniskillen Railway line in 1850 but which was eventually colloquially known as the GNR Derry Road by the time of its closure.

Foyle Road station fatefully closed to passengers for the final time from February 14, 1965 , just four days, as it happened, after John Lockwood controversially recommended that a second university for the north be located in Coleraine rather than Derry.

The closure of the railways in the west was seen by many alongside the Lockwood decision at the time as two sides of the same coin. The station was eventually demolished by September 1970.

You can read more about the old station on the http://disused-stations.org.uk/