Richard Boyle, Civil Engineer, Is Born in Dublin

Richard Vicars Boyle CSI (1822–1908) was an Irish civil engineer, noted for his part in the Siege of Arrah in 1857, and as a railway pioneer in Japan.

Born in Dublin on 14 March 1822, he was from a Scots-Irish background, the third son of Vicars Armstrong Boyle; his mother was Sophia, eldest daughter of David Courtney of Dublin. After education at a private school and two years’ service on the trigonometrical survey of Ireland he became a pupil to Charles Blacker Vignoles.

When he had finished his articles, he was engaged on railway construction in Ireland, at first as assistant to William Dargan, who employed him on the Belfast and Armagh and the Dublin and Drogheda Railways. In 1845, under Sir John Benjamin Macneill, he surveyed and laid out part of the Great Southern and Western Railway, and in 1846–7 was chief engineer for the Longford and Sligo Railway. In the autumn of 1852, he laid out railways and waterworks in Spain as chief assistant to George Willoughby Hemans, son of Felicia Hemans.