It’s rare enough that myself and the London Telegraph would be in agreement. One of the ‘yellow press’ my grandfather was so scornful of (long memories after they did for Parnell), the ‘Torygraph’ is sometimes synonymous with punch cartoons and ‘Oirish’ sterotyping.

We do agree on one thing however. The majesty of St Pancras railway station in London is something to behold. The station, having nearly been abandoned in the 60s and fallen into disuse and dilapidation in the 90s has just completed a restoration and is now a fully functioning mainline rail station which serves amongst others the channel tunnel.

St Pancras International

The poet and conservationist John Betjeman spearheaded the campaign to save this station amongst the classical destruction phase of the 60s when modernism took hold among architecture and infrastructure projects.

Bringing back to an Irish context, a dicussion arose today as to the investment in Irish Rail projects and the millions spent recently to restore the roof of Heuston station. Heuston today serves the lion’s share of south and south-western lines including our own Kildare line and once was the centrepiece of a huge rail network. It would be almost a sister station of St Pancras sharing a lot of features, internal and out, although perhaps less celebrated. Over the course of the last couple of years the station’s roof has been gradually restored to the glass apex that adorned it in Victorian times.

I have talked at length before about government investment in rail infrastructure and will do so again but the question today was whether the restoration funding might have been better employed elsewhere. We didn’t have Betjeman but I think we made the right call.