As I visited some time ago one of the few automotive museums in the republic of Ireland (I live there), I thought it might be interesting to make reviews of automotive museums as well.
Within the borders of the old county Dublin resides the fishing village of Howth. Howth is a small peninsula situated at one of the extremes of Dublin bay.
The village is home to one of the countries automotive museums and prides itself as being the "National Transport Museum". It is a bit difficult to find actually. When going towards the village, just before the sign post is an entrance to a Golf Club, a castle and the museum. Go through the gate and take the first small gravel road to the right. Eventhough it looks uninviting, it is the access road to the museum. The museum itself lacks funding and it shows. It looks like a shed and probably started out life just that. Inside this shed is an amazing array of mostly public transport vehicles. Double deckers, trams, and to a lesser extend commercial vehicles.
It hosts some truly unique Irish vehicles, like a Irish made Leyland Atlantean, a Van Hool-McArdle build Atlantean (made in Inchicore, Dublin), a Bombardier double decker (made in Shannon, to the west of Ireland), which has a two-stroke Detroit Diesel engine and was once the main bulk of Dublin Bus/CIE's stock. but also an example of a truck build by the only commercial truck manufacturer that Ireland once had, the trailer manufacturer Dennison made towards the end of the seventies a series of trucks with Rolls-Royce diesel engines and SISU cabs. There are two unique Timoney vehicles, a fire truck and a armoured truck. Timoney was responsible for the design of Australia's Bushmaster.
Besides the Irish made vehicles there are some vehicles that served Irish companies like ESB (electricity supplier), Dublin City Council, some of the Fire Brigades in the country but also an electric laundry vehicle. The museum is certainlty worth a visit, eventhough there are no Irish passenger cars.
Unfortunately, the Killarney museum has closed it's door and the collection was recently sold off. This means that the unique Silver Stream is no longer on public display. If I would've known this at the time I would've visited it and I would've made some pictures. As it is, we need to make do with pictures on the net, which are scarce.
(left to right: Bombardier bus, Dennison truck, Atkinson truck of Dublin bus)
