The heritage train that runs between Bushmills and the Giant’s Causeway today follows part of a much older, much stranger story — the world’s first long-distance hydroelectric tramway, built by two brothers from a small estate near Bushmills.
The Traills of Ballylough
Anthony and William Atcheson Traill grew up at Ballylough House, a few kilometres south of Bushmills. Anthony went on to become Provost of Trinity College Dublin — nominated personally by King Edward VII — and is credited with admitting the first women students there. William was a geological engineer with a master’s degree, working for the Geological Survey of Ireland.
In October 1879, Anthony chaired a meeting in Bushmills to plan a rail link between Portrush and the Causeway. The line that eventually resulted skipped an earlier, more ambitious scheme (a branch line via Dervock all the way to Ballycastle never happened), but a bill for the Portrush–Bushmills stretch passed Parliament in 1880, with Queen Victoria’s assent that August.
Financing a Victorian tech project
The Traills weren’t short of serious backers. Samuel Mountifort Longfield, a Trinity economics professor, put in £1,000. Sir William Thompson — better known today as Lord Kelvin, for whom the temperature scale is named — invested the same amount and helped connect the Traills to Dr William Siemens, of the German engineering family whose company (Siemens AG) is still a global name today. Siemens Bros of London ended up as the project’s electrical engineers.
Between them, the Traills, Kelvin, and Siemens decided to power the tram electrically rather than by steam alone — genuinely radical for 1881. William Traill personally supervised the construction of a hydroelectric generating station at Walkmill Falls on the River Bush, using the river’s natural drop to generate the power.
Opening day
Track-laying began in September 1881. Steam engines opened the line for public transport in January 1883, with the electrified stretch (Portrush to White Rocks) following that March, and a full public opening on 28 September 1883. Invitations to the opening went out to Queen Victoria and her son-in-law, the German Emperor — neither came, but the Viceroy of Ireland, the Earl Spencer, stood in as guest of honour, arriving via an overnight stay at Downhill with Sir Henry Hervey Bruce. At Walkmill Falls, Sir William Thompson demonstrated the new hydroelectric plant by shaking hands with guests while holding a live terminal from the Siemens dynamo — a stunt that would not pass a modern health and safety inspection.
The line to Bushmills was finished within its first year. Extending it onward to the Causeway itself took longer — a dispute with a local landowner over the route delayed things until 1887, when the extension opened via a new lattice-metal bridge over the Bush, named the Victoria Jubilee Bridge to mark the Queen’s fiftieth year on the throne. It’s still there today.
A trailblazer of the next generation
William Traill’s daughter May turned out to be a genuine trailblazer in her own right. A January 1918 newspaper report found her, aged 22, named star player in a ladies’ football match between Southampton and Portsmouth teams — but her real achievement was on the factory floor. After two years as a wartime chauffeuse for the Ministry of Munitions, she was appointed “electric driver” at the power-house of a new Government rolling mill near Southampton, put in charge of a 10,000 horsepower electricity plant — a post, the paper noted at the time, “never before undertaken by any woman in this country.” The reporter speculated it might run in the family, given her father’s own engineering fame — a nice echo of the tramway story a generation on.
What happened to it
The original tramway ran for 65 years before closing in 1949. Its route sat unused for decades until part of it reopened in 2002 as the heritage railway visitors ride today — see our practical guide to riding it for current times and prices.