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I  always had a soft spot for Gort, most of the yard was retained and used for storing redundant wagons after the end of wagon load traffic. A lot of cement and possibly fertiliser traffic in later years appears to have been in connection with the merchants yard which was at a lower level than the railway, I remember watching a forklift off loading bagged cement off a train parked on the main line and delivering the pallets direct to the merchants yard. Adding a head shunt improves the operationally flexibility of the station as a train from the Athenry direction can now enter the Ardrahan-Gort section while a train is shunting the yard. I would be inclined to reverse the crossover from the main line to the yard to allow a train from Limerick to run directly into the headshunt/layby and shunt clear of the main line. A further crossover controlled by a ground frame could be added further out to allow North bound goods trains to depart without setting back into the station. There was a similar arrangement for south bound cattle specials from the Up yard in Tuam This allows two trains to cross at the station while a goods is recessed in the layby or shunting the yard, a common arrangement on the Galway Line and Mayo Road. Goods yard head shunts were fairly uncommon on the Limerick-Sligo line, Ennis & Tuam being the main exceptions, I guess traffic traffic levels never justified the investment.

Ah, yes, that's when it was going to Whitehead! It had been repainted for that.

That's got a lot of potential to be a very nice little operation!

I've now added in the point motors and tidied up the wiring a bit. The point motors are in good nick and recycled from the attic layout. Also recycled is the expensive ish but very useful DCC concepts point motors controller that lets me run the points off the NCE powercab. Bit of a test run with some stock too.

That's the presenident coach. Actually like that for years at the time. In store under cover in Inchicore. The black roofs started to appear early 2000s. There was even a few grey roofs but they didn't last long.