Portrush existed long before the railway — but it was the railway that turned a small fishing village into a seaside resort.
Arrival, 1855
In the early 1800s, Portrush was little more than cabins clustered round the harbour, which was greatly enlarged between 1826 and 1835 with new piers. The Belfast and Ballymena Railway opened in 1848, reaching Coleraine by 1853; Portrush itself was connected via the Ballymena, Ballymoney, Coleraine and Portrush Junction Railway, ceremonially opened on 7 November 1855 with a non-stop train from Belfast’s York Road carrying, as one newspaper put it, “the wealth, intelligence and beauty of the north.” Through running from Londonderry followed in 1860, via a timber-and-iron swing-bridge over the River Bann, replaced in 1924 by an iron-and-concrete cantilever lifting bridge. Over the following 25 years, Portrush “blossomed as a sea-side resort” — and by the 1880s, the original single-platform 1855 station could no longer cope with holiday traffic.
A new station, 1893
In October 1888, the Belfast & Northern Counties Railway appointed Berkeley Deane Wise — compared in stature to Charles Lanyon, the architect behind Portrush Town Hall — as Resident Engineer, tasked with designing a wholly new station. Wise’s building, opened in spring 1893 at a cost of over £10,000, added three 600-foot platforms, a 200-foot train shed, a Grand Concourse, water towers, a locomotive turntable, and a new signal box, built in Mock Tudor style by McLaughlin & Harvey of Belfast, topped with a 50-foot, four-dial clock tower.
The world’s tallest grandfather clock
Inside stood a genuinely remarkable object: a 17.5-foot longcase clock, made by Sharman D. Neill of Belfast and dated 1892, reputedly the tallest grandfather clock in the world. Removed from the station in 1971, it was rescued from scrap in 1984, restored, and now awaits its return to Portrush from Causeway Coast & Glens council offices in Coleraine.
From tea room to nightclub
The station’s café, seating 250–300, had several lives after its Victorian heyday: a 1924 concert hall, a WWII American-forces canteen, and a school-meals canteen, before demolition in the 1970s. Only one of the original two Tudor-Cottage-style refreshment kiosks survives today, preserved at the Ulster Transport Museum in Cultra. The main building later became a nightclub and amusement arcade, before the 2019 Open Championship prompted the reinstatement of three working platforms — restoring, in part, the grandeur Wise had designed for it well over a century earlier.