Bangor Bus and Rail Centre is a combined rail and bus interchange which serves the city of Bangor in

County Down County Down () is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. It covers an area of and has a population of 552,261. It borders County Antrim to the ...

, Northern Ireland. The station in its current form was built in the year 2000 to celebrate the new

millennium A millennium () is a period of one thousand years, one hundred decades, or ten centuries, sometimes called a kiloannum (ka), or kiloyear (ky). Normally, the word is used specifically for periods of a thousand years that begin at the starting ...

History

The station was opened by the

Belfast and County Down Railway The Belfast and County Down Railway (BCDR) was an Irish gauge () railway in Ireland (later Northern Ireland) linking Belfast with County Down. It was built in the 19th century and absorbed into the Ulster Transport Authority in 1948. All but the ...

on 1 May 1865 and closed to goods traffic on 24 April 1950.

Daylight saving time Daylight saving time (DST), also referred to as daylight savings time, daylight time (Daylight saving time in the United States, United States and Daylight saving time in Canada, Canada), or summer time (British Summer Time, United Kingdom, ...

was introduced by the Summer Time Act 1916 and implemented on 1 October 1916 as GMT plus one hour and Dublin Mean Time plus one hour. However, Dublin Mean Time (used by the railways) had a disparity of twenty-five minutes with Greenwich Mean Time, which meant that the Bangor Railway Station Clock was to be put back only thirty-five minutes instead of one hour. An additional complication was that the clocks in Belfast and Bangor were twenty-three minutes and thirty-nine seconds behind Greenwich Mean Time (not twenty-five minutes as in Dublin), so the final adjustment was thirty-six minutes and twenty-one seconds. The change to the time displayed on the Bangor Station Clock was not welcomed by commuters. The station buildings were originally erected in 1864–1865 to designs by the architect

Charles Lanyon Sir Charles Lanyon Deputy Lieutenant, DL, Justice of the Peace, JP (6 January 1813 – 31 May 1889) was an English Architecture, architect of the 19th century. His work is most closely associated with Belfast, Northern Ireland. Biography Lanyo ...

. Following World War 2, however, refurbishments made by the Ulster Transport Authority to this

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

structure damaged the original Lanyon-designed building, stripping it of much of its original brickwork. The company then rebuilt the building, before it was reconstructed again to a new design in 2000. In the year 2000, then-mayor of Bangor Alan Chambers sealed a time capsule near the entrance of the station which is to be opened in 2100.

Services

Mondays to Saturdays there is a half-hourly service toward Belfast Grand Central. Extra services operate at peak times and reduce to hourly operation in the evenings. Certain peak-time services from this station operate as expresses between and or Belfast Lanyon Place. On Sundays, there is an hourly service to Belfast City Centre and onward.

References

{{UK railway stations Railway stations in County Down Bangor, County Down Railway stations in Northern Ireland opened in 1865 Railway stations served by NI Railways Railway stations in Northern Ireland opened in the 1860s