Having a yarn to one of my distant relatives over the weekend about our farming forebears it was fascinating to discover one of them wasn't an agrarian type - he was in fact a stationmaster.
That was in the days when the local head of the railways was a man of the highest stature, up there with the postmaster, the bank manager, the general practitioner and the parish priest.
It was when most rural towns had rows of railway houses, when rail wasn't only the preferred mode of passenger travel but was also the main player in freight haulage.
All that came to an end during the final, blurry years of the Muldoon Government when the Railways Department became the Railways Corporation. At the same time land transport was deregulated and that led to what we've got today - carnage on our roads.
Before the change, road freight could only be carried for relatively short distances, the long haul was the preserve of railways. Today it's open slather.