Mol_PMB

Used over 15 years after the MR NCC became the LMS NCC!

Thanks. If the mood takes me, I might do something similar for other classes. I picked the B101s to do first because it was a small and relatively short-lived class. The A's and C's would be a bit daunting, and the GMs a bit dull; I might do D's E's and G's.

I'm a bit doubtful of the livery sequence shown for B113, I think at least one of the photo dates is wrong. It was -G- in 1959: And in 1960: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53499016749/ This photo shows B113 in plain green, 'circa 1962': https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511770384/ This photo from Ernie is dated 1962 but is the one I'm most doubtful of the date, because it would mean that 113 was painted plain black before it was painted black and deep tan. Also in this photo it is surrounded by black Metrovicks so I think later 1960s is more likely: It was BDT in the mid-60s, exact date unknown: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53526390417 ...and I suspect the black period came after that. Then I think it spent a few years out of service before being reinstated in BYP for the last few years.

Progress continues on the Courtaulds wagons and the GNR van, but in the meantime a brief burst of winter sunshine encouraged me to take the photo plank and the corrugated wagons out into the sunshine. I think I should have taken the tripod as well, so I could use a longer exposure and smaller aperture, as F10 wasn't enough for the depth of field I wanted. But the sun's gone again now so I'm stuck with these!

@leslie10646, ebay is full of your products! Dapol GN wagon, £50 or £30: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/275863223833 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/235833945108 Dapol East Downshire Steamship Co wagon, £40 or £50: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285295732353 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/275863233638 Dapol John Milligan wagon, £40: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285295734748

I did a table of the liveries carried by the B101 class, based on photos I found online or in books: Obviously it's not complete as I couldn't find a photo of every loco in every year. Where there is a text entry in a cell that indicates a dated photo showing that livery on that loco. Cells coloured but empty are a reasonable assumption based on the same livery appearing in the years before and after. The blue boxes at the bottom represent the period when the locos were stopped. Some locos were repainted in 1974/75 while stopped, and never re-entered service. I expect there are some gaps that could be filled by photos I haven't found yet. There are lots of photos which aren't dated, or only to the nearest decade. They aren't shown here, unless they depict a livery not shown in any dated photos, in which case they're in the bottom row. It is possible that some photos are wrongly dated. Some findings, which probably aren't a surprise: Apart from the as-delivered silver livery in 1957/8, there was no subsequent year when the whole class carried the same livery. The general sequence was silver - green - black and deep tan - plain black - black and shallow tan - supertrain. Some locos had a pinstripe on the green, others didn't, 105 and 113 carried both variants with the pinstriped one being earlier. jhb171achill mentioned the unusual version of black and deep tan livery carried by the B101s, lacking the white cantrail stripe. This came between the green and the plain black periods, and was certainly carried by 103, 109, 110, 111, 112; 111 carried it when withdrawn. 113 and 114 carried a more conventional black and deep tan livery with white cantrail stripe. As far as I can tell, only 113 and 114 had yellow panels on the front, but both had previously . Some locos may have skipped some liveries. Can anyone surprise me with a variant I haven't yet found, or fill any gaps in the table?

Ah look, another rabbit-hole for me to dive into! That's a great photo and I had also been puzzling over the reference to conversions from H vans - this is clearly wrong for this batch and I suspect it was a copy and paste error somewhere. Scaling off the photo confirms the 11' wheelbase if they are 20' over headstocks. Pender&Richards (1967) list the original flats as: 25201-25435 Flat, built 1962, 12 ton capacity, 20'0" over headstocks, vacuum brake. 'Nos 25201-25435 are on a conventional-type underframe and are fully vacuum braked. A number are fitted with locating blocks to secure a load of three large Guinness tanks, loaded at the North Wall.' The 1975 WTT lists them as: 25201-25435 Flat, 12 tonne capacity, 7 tonnes tare I have recently acquired a 1978 WTT which doesn't appear to list them at all, nor do the 1985 or 1986 WTTs. Doyle&Hirsch 1978 and 1981 have a photo of 24558 and seem to list some of them as: 24516-24566 Ballast wagon, introduced 1973, 12 ton capacity, wheelbase 10', weight 5 tons 7 cwt, hand braked only, converted from covered wagons of 17222 series. There's a lot wrong in this listing, if they are indeed describing the same wagons. However, the listing in Doyle&Hirsch does tend to lump together different wagons types into groups so maybe some did fit that description and others didn't. Anyway, to the photos! Starting with those in the original number series. An IRRS photo from the 1960s showing 25208 and two others looking brand new: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511886625 In Ernie's photo dated 1964, here's one lurking in the dock at Killarney: Again from Ernie in 1964, one up north with a Guinness Tank: An IRRS photo showing 25277 loaded with a demountable dropside body in 1966: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53508466241 And then in PW use, some in the 245xx series, some in the A series, and other unidentifiable: Here is jhb171achill's photo of 24565 in use at Portlaoise in 1977/8: An IRRS photo showing 24556 at Mullingar in 1986: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53509438590 An IRRS photo showing one loaded with a diesel engine at Inchicore in 1970: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511310066 Here are three carrying PWD mess huts and renumbered as 176A, 572A, 578A in 1971: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511746480 https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53570644078 Wicklow, 1973, an unidentifiable example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53569594857 That's all I've got.

jhb171achill did better than he remembered in recording these wagons - here's another one I found whilst delving in the catacombs (a wonderful thread!) This is at Heuston in 1977: 24419 is one of the batch converted from cattle wagons; some of these had dropsides and others were built without - this is one of the latter. The chassis is in grey livery with a tiny roundel on the solebar, but the end is red (with the number repeated on the end). Here's a much-magnified snippet of one of Paddy O'Brien's photos on the IRRS archive (linked in an earlier post) which shows the same type of wagon in the same livery. It also has the tiny roundel on the grey solebar, and the red end.

I'll add a few more links to photos that I've come across, showing Courtaulds wagons or similar. This photo from jhb171achill shows an NIR container dumped on wagon C406, which appears to be a former NCC Courtaulds wagon cut down to a flat. This wouldn't be suitable for carrying 20' containers in service because it isn't long enough. I think that in service the containers were normally carried on the chassis from NCC brown vans. Another photo from jhb171achill shows an unmodified wagon still surviving at Antrim in the 1970s: C202, of the ex-GNR type, and not painted bauxite despite the C number. Again from jhb171achill: The following are in the IRRS archive, only visible to IRRS members I'm afraid: C9 at Larne Harbour in 1973, NCC type, bauxite livery, not cut down: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511735225 C45 at York Rd in 1968, NCC type, bauxite livery, not cut down: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53509198783 C11 and C20 at Coleraine in 1967, NCC type, bauxite livery, not cut down, loaded with coal: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53509190156 One hiding behind a spoil wagon at York Road in 1967: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53509509479

There were several variations of this front treatment on the 80s. The first batch had the white 'moustache' as shown. 89 was delivered from BREL fully painted and had a thinner moustache than the rest, which were painted by NIR. By 1976/77 they had all had the moustache trimmed so that it no longer wrapped round the corners, like this photo from Jonathan Allen on Flickr. 89's was trimmed too, but remained thin. The second batch was delivered with the diamonds and NIR logos. As far as I can tell, 69 was the only one to have carried the CityTrack logo on the cab front, though it was applied to the sides of many of the class. There was a lot of variation in the shape and size of the diamonds, this photo of 98 from Jonathan Allen on Flickr is quite different from your image of 69 above: There first batch were repainted in the late 70s / early 80s with diamonds replacing the moustaches; again there was a lot of variation in the size and shape of the diamond. Later repaints (including some of the second batch) had the ends of the diamond cropped off like your photo of 86, but some had a full diamond like this photo of 81 from Jonathan Allen on Flickr: So, when IRM get round to producing the iconic 80 class, there are plenty of livery variants to go at, even for the initial livery!

Were those Mk2 EGVs ever made in Supertrain livery? They often seem to come up on eBay in the later IR or IE schemes, or the one-off to match the 201s. The GN wagon is now up to £50 !!!

Many thanks for taking the photos and sharing them on Flickr!

I definitely had one of those Lima Mk1 composite coaches back in the 1980s. It's a genuine model, though not of a real prototype. Issued about the same time as the Class 33 painted as an A class (which I also had).

The van is now in the weathering stages, looks a bit piebald at present but be patient... Meanwhile, I have taken a step across the border for the next project. Here I am conducting some surgery - can you tell what it is yet? I am attempting the same conversion on two different kits of almost the same thing; the kits are Parkside PC25 and Cambrian C107. They both have their pros and cons - so far I think the Cambrian kit is a better representation of their intended prototype, but the Parkside kit is definitely easier to convert.

Achill station and yard would take up a massive space in its own right. Hard to imagine why it was built so large; I guess the land was effectively free and someone was hoping for an upsurge in traffic?

If anyone else wants to try this (myself included) the Deltic wheel sets are half price in the black friday sale: (1) Wheelsets — Accurascale

The Barrowmore MRG have a BR container diagram book here: BRContainerIssueB.pdf They are not all the same size. The common 'BD' which features in many of the photos above has a footprint of 16'x7' over the body, but is 5 inches bigger in both directions over the fenders. An Irish standard underframe is about 16'11" long over headstocks; subtract 3" each end for plank thickness and interior ironwork and you're down to 16'5" which is exactly the same as the container length over fenders. No wonder it's a tight fit - perhaps it was meant to be? Widthwise I wouldn't expect such a problem in the wooden wagons, but the corrugated wagons seem a little narrower?

Those look excellent and are a nice inspiration for a load. There are plenty of photos of BR containers (and the less common CIE containers) loaded into open wagons of both the corrugated and wooden varieties, and it looks like there's plenty of space within them. I suspect the wagon sides are a bit thicker than prototypical, and the detail moulded on the containers and wagons is a bit thicker than prototype, meaning that they don't fit so well in model form. This IRRS photo shows dozens of (bacon) containers in wagons at Rosslare waiting to be exported: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53449386736 But they also appear in smaller quantities in images in the public domain, such as these from Ernie: And this from Roger Joanes: And finally from Brian Flannigan: Was it the length or the width that was the problem with fitting them in? Or both?

Tonight's challenge is adding extra rivets to the ex-GN van using Railtec rivet transfers. In the past I've used Archer rivet transfers, this was my first attempt with the Railtec ones. They are equally fiddly, but can produce a good result when applied with care. Photo from Ernie showing the rivetted strips around the doors and along the bottom of the body, that I'm representing:

I didn't know myself until I started looking at the photos and then went down a rabbit-hole trying to find out more! I do enjoy research as much as building the models. I'm hoping @leslie10646 will produce another run of his kits as I'd like to build a few with the different variations.

A couple more photos I've stumbled across while searching for other things... A panorama of North Wall with tens of thousands of railway sleepers, many loaded onto wagons. There are at least 20 'ballast' wagons in the photo, which mostly appear to be the conversions from cattle wagons, some with sides and some without. They mostly seem to have black underframes and red bodies, though the shades of red are variable from bauxite to pink: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511515508/ A 1950s photo at Inchicore featuring one of the steel-underframe variants, which seems to have had its body planking renewed in unpainted wood: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53509178859/ This isn't a ballast wagon, it's a 'ballast van'. The presence of two of these in the working timetable listings for the 1975-1986 period had been puzzling me - why on earth would they use a van for ballast? Well the answer is that they were vans for people to shovel the ballast. 24803 and 24804 are listed in the 1985 WTT and here is the first of them, a 6-wheeler that looks purpose-built as a PWD mess van: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511314016/ Freshly painted in 1970 in red livery (slightly brownish red but much brighter than normal freight brown) with roundel. Underframe, ends and roof are black. This is probably a good indication of the colour of the dropside wagons before they faded or got dirty. It also appears in this 1965 black and white photo with a snail: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511587200

Having done some research, here's a little more info on the CIE lowmac (low machinery) wagons. Pender & Richards (1967) list: 23959-23962, Machinery, 20 ton capacity, 26'6" length over headstocks, built in 1954. 'Machinery Wagons...The four-wheeled wagons built in 1954 are to the same design as two built by the GSR in 1925'. Pender & Richards only list CIE-built wagons, and there are 4 of them, plus 2 GSR, suggests a total of 6. The 1975 CIE working timetable lists: 23957-23962 Machinery Truck, 20 tonnes capacity, 12 tonnes tare That's a total of 6 and suggests that the GSR wagons were 23957-23958. They do not appear in the 1985 or 1986 working timetable listings. Nor do they appear in the 1979 or 1981 Doyle&Hirsch stockbooks. I think this is because they were renumbered into the internal use series with the A suffix. The very first photo in this thread appears to show 649A, also mentioned in the thread above are 645A, 650A, & 651A. Intriguingly, the range from 645A to 651A represents seven wagons, not six. Here are some links to more photos on Flickr; only IRRS members will be able to see these in the IRRS archive. One of the GSR pair in the late 1920s, carrying a damaged ballast hopper wagon: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53813126331 23958 in 1969, with plain bearings and older buffers: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511648559 A couple of photos of one carrying a yellow and black mobile crane in 1976: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511728140/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511296761 A series of photos with one carrying a blue mobile crane in the 1980s: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53526421602/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53527462883/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53526383912/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53527462893/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53527285271/ 650A at Inchicore in 1986, with a load of alternators: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53509017991/ The livery appears to be black in all these photos; only the Gordon Hawkins image in an earlier post is red-brown. The Dapol Kitmaster (ex-Airfix) plastic kit for a BR diagram 2/244 'Lowmac EK' is a pretty close match to these wagons in style, shape and size. The Irish wagons were a foot longer, probably a little wider, and there were detail differences, but it's not bad: Hope that helps and inspires? Mol

Let us know how you get on - I was thinking of fitting some to a Murphy Cravens.

Hi John, Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but would you be able to point me towards this photo? I've had a look on the IRRS Flickr archive but I can't find it. I did find these two images of LMA vans though: https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53508657828 https://www.flickr.com/photos/irishrailwayarchive/53511166741 Many thanks, Paul

I'd missed one! I think this may be one of jhb171achill's photos which I downloaded earlier, and then forgot about. This is a super photo of 24048, with the plain axleguards and in all-over bauxite paint with roundel: This shows some of the details rather more clearly.