A PIONEERING electric train, the creation of Dr James J Drumm, was Ireland’s first green revolution on the railways. The battery-powered train worked well, but the shortages caused by the second World War and the usual political machinations here at home, saw an end to the experiment 61 years ago, after nearly 20 years in service.
Drumm, a brilliant student of chemistry, came from Dundrum, Co Down, and his first education was at the local national school, where his mother was a teacher. He received his secondary education at St Macartan’s College, Monaghan, before third-level studies at UCD, where he was awarded an Honours BSc in chemistry, followed by an MSc degree.
He spent three years working with a chemical company in England, before returning to Ireland, where his first invention, in Dublin, was a fine quality soap. Then he worked to keep peas green after they were canned.
In 1925, he attended a lecture on batteries that sparked his interest in the subject and he began developing an alkaline battery cell that could be rapidly charged and discharged.
His work in developing this traction battery coincided with the construction of the hydro- electric dam at Ardnacrusha, which was completed in 1929. It started producing far more electricity than the country needed at the time, so using some of it as motive power on the railways was a tempting option.
Nearly a century previously, the Rev Dr Nicholas Callan, that great electrical pioneer in Maynooth, had proposed a battery-operated train between Dublin and Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire. But what worked well in the laboratory didn’t transform into commercial reality. Drumm was able to make that quantum leap.
His invention was first made public in 1927 and attracted widespread interest, not just here, but across Europe and in the US. The government of the day, through the then minister of industry and commerce, Paddy McGilligan, was enthusiastic and promptly allocated development funds. A Great Southern Railways permanent way inspection car was fitted out with 60 nickel- zinc rechargeable battery cells, each the size of a one gallon (4.5 litres) drum, wired in sequence.
The initial tests were held during August, 1929, between Kingsbridge and Hazlehatch, Co Kildare. The train could get up to to 50mph (80 kph) in just 50 seconds. Extensive testing followed, including at UCD. The longest test run was from Kingsbridge to Portarlington and back, all on a single charge.
One of the people most closely connected with those tests was the late Gerard de Sachy, who lived in Ranelagh, Dublin. His family were close friends of my family, (he and my late father- in- law, Hugh Quinn, were great friends), yet in his latter years, I never once heard him talk about his work in developing the Drumm train.
By early December, 1931, the first Drumm train, with 13.5 tonnes of batteries fitted underneath it, was ready, capable of carrying 140 passengers. This newspaper reported ” the Drumm train proved itself no longer a pre- vision of the future, but rather a concrete achievement” . By 1939, four Drumm trains were in regular daily use. The longest Drumm trains had up to eight coaches.
The trains were built at the railway works in Inchicore, a remarkable feat, considering that the previous experience of the workforce there had been entirely with steam locos. The batteries were charged at Amiens Street (now Connolly station) and Bray, and a train could easily do 200 miles (just over 320km) and more a day.
It didn’t all run smoothly. On one occasion, when Eamon de Valera’s government had just come to power, a trip was organised from Dublin to Gorey, with Dev aboard. All went went well until the return journey, when a director of Drumm’s company, a Prof Nolan, decided he wanted to get off the train at Blackrock. The battery became so run down that the train barely made the rest of the journey to Westland Row, although none of the VIPs on board was any the wiser.
For most of the 1930s and into the emergency years of the war, the Drumm train plied, very efficiently, between the old Harcourt Street station and Bray, sometimes continuing to Greystones. Fuel for steam locos was in short supply, so the Drumm trains were a godsend, at least to commuters in south Dublin.
Drumm’s own company had to close down in 1940, as it was no longer possible to try to promote the system abroad. The batteries had been designed to last 10 years and getting components for them proved increasingly difficult.
By the summer of 1944, when electricity was in short supply, the Drumm train had been withdrawn from regular use. In the Dáil that summer, Seán Lemass was non-committal as to whether the trains would ever be used again. After all, it hadn’t been developed under a Fianna Fáil government.
The last Drumm train ran on July 12th, 1949; most of the coaches were converted to ordinary railway working and no relics were preserved of the pioneering train. At around the same time, the last of the old electric trams in Dublin city were withdrawn from service, two early blows to the idea of green public transport.
One development at the same time helped undermine the Drumm train. In the early 1930s, the Great Northern Railway company had started producing diesel locos at its Dundalk engineering works. Eventually, diesel became the sole motive power of the railway system in Ireland, a cheap replacement for steam, but dependent on imported oil, not a very green solution.
A couple of years before Drumm died in 1974, at the age of 77, Gregg Ryan, who is heritage officer with Irish Rail, met the great pioneer at Drumm’s house in Rathgar. Drumm may have been elderly, but he had perfect recall of his battery-operated train and also remembered vividly how the war-time shortages combined with political intrigues had helped finish off his unique train.
Electricity didn’t re-emerge as the motive power for railways in Ireland until the Dart was launched in 1984. Then Luas light rail followed 20 years later. In both cases, there’s an overhead power supply. Following the ending of the Drumm train, the idea of battery power wasn’t again considered, despite its impressive efficiency and green credentials.