All Aboard!

This Stationhouse in Irvinestown is home to Jane and Floyd who inherited the building and modernised it while retaining its original character.

It’s not everybody that gets to be brought up in a railway station, but Jane, with her sisters Claire and Ramona, spent their childhoods in Irvinestown Station house in County Fermanagh, built as part of the Great Northern Railway Company in 1876 and decommissioned in 1957 as road haulage was then seen as the transport of the future.

Jane’s father rented the station along with the stationmaster’s house in 1957 from the Great Northern Railway Company who, having terminated rail services, were as yet unsure what to do with the property. Her father’s family business was the bottling and distribution of Guinness and the black gold was bottled in the old waiting room, now Jane and husband Floyd’s summer sitting room. Other buildings were used as offices and stores, and the family lived in the old station master’s house.

‘I still remember the day the old steel railway tracks were removed,’ says Jane. ‘I was three years old and my dad held me up to see the big engine outside. We loved living in the station, and as the film The Railway Children came out around that time, we thought it was really a special place to be.’

When the Great Northern Railway Company finally decided to dispose of the property in 1969, the Rehill family didn’t know if they were going to be able to buy it, and moved out into a caravan for three months while the building was advertised as being for sale. In the event, Jane’s father managed to secure the sale, so they moved back in, adding central heating and a new bathroom to make the station house more comfortable.