jhb171achill

Bridge styles vary enormously on the GNR, with Dublin & Drogheda ones, solid INWR types, and even some surviving Ulster Railway sandstone. The two at Lambeg are, I think, the oldest surviving railway bridges in Ireland in original condition. GNR(I) bridge plates were oval.

Absolutely! I need to concoct a rationale for an IRM ICR appearing on a layout bnased in 1955-65......! Maybe if i put a "Tardis"-style "police box" in a corner in the goods yard.... The magnets are a very good idea.

Right-hand running, per se, was never used on any Irish line and as far as I know not British either. However, many lines both in the past and today, especially passing loops, were / are signalled for bi-directional working, so there's your "link"! My own layout, Dugort Harbour, is imagined to be in an impossibly remote west Kerry area, because some genius came uop with the idea of making it into a major transatlantic port in 1888 or something. A cursory look at any map shows that had anything remotely resembling it ever been built, engineering works through impassable mountains west of Macroom would have been necessary, doubtless resembling the huge viaducts you have!

Very impressive - was it originally American outline? (Would explain "wrong-lione" operation on double track section?) Love the scenery, and a good collection of models....

Requests have officially been made already, and paperwork submitted.

Note the lorry on the right still in green but with a "CIE" sticker over the "snail", a la container style. Hadn't seen that before.

560 kept its plates to the end. Very very few engines did in CIE days. You're right about detail differences. Within ANY class, by the 1950s barely any two engines on the whole system were EXACTLY the same! And if they were, maybe one was green and one was grey!

To be fair, enough of these things are preserved now. Putting diesel on plinths doersn't tend to have a good ending in Ireland - indeed, putting anything railwayish on a plinth....

Good to meet Mol__PMB, Signalpost and others from the forum on the Tailte Tours West Cork jaunt on Saturday. As always, the after-party was great too; some of us (you know who you are) even drank Beamish and Murphys. Not like those oul jhb Jackeens with their Guinness....... The good news is, Tailte Tours are already weighing up at least half a dozen different possibilities for day tours, or even 2-day ones.

If you'd shaved its back, you'd have seen its flying snail tattoo.... Great to see you on the tour, Mol, and those sublimely excellent vans in a natural setting. You've beaten me to it; I was about to post my own very similar pictuire here!

……. and your locos for free….

Yes, they were general goods trains. Some services were mixed, and railcar passenger services often had a couple of goods vans on the back which were picked up / dropped off at various stations en route.

A repaint would make it close enough to a CIE "D" class. Add some of CK print's "0" scale CIE wagons, and you've got a perfect small "0" gauge shunting layout!

On April 1st, IRM / Heljascale will be taking over Irish Rail, NIR, Greenland, Iran, the USA & Ukraine also, I have heard from a very reliable source.

Lazy journalism; a style which has become more common in the last 20 years, “sure, it’ll do” mentality. COMPLETELY unacceptable.

These were fully brake passenger coaches, rather than a goods brake with a few seats. Normally, a brake passenger vehicle had seats at one end, van at the other. But sometimes the van was in the middle, and the CDR standardised on this. The Bandon had a broad gauge one, and from memory the GSWR had a couple too, though I’d have to check.

The one shown there in that black'n'white photo is almost certainly (in fact, I'd say absolutely certainly) in post-1955 "standard" lighter green. The various shades trialled, which you mention, were according to JhbSenior "all much the same"; his friend who was the "paint chemist" at Dundalk Works for the GNR took the view that rather than a whole pile of different shades, theye were actually intended to be similar in colour, but mixed with different ingredients. This gentleman, the late Marcus Bailie-Gage, used to explain to a teenage me stuff about differing amounts of lead mixed in paint mixes, and the relative longevity of differing variations. Thus, these experiments were likely to be more about experiments in longevity than simply different colours; if the latter resulted, the inference is that it was a by-product of the former. Marcus, who was an absolute gentleman, lived to be a very great age and passed away about fifteen or eighteen years ago.

One of the exceptionally few Irish railway books I don't have (I think!)

In 1952/3 they experimented with a lighter shade, so it could be one of them. While no solid proof exists, it is likely that this was a trial run for the post-1955 lighter green. Nothing was painted dark grn with full lining AFTER 1955; and apart from this batch mentioned, notjhing was light green before 1955. It is around 1955/6 that the silver vehicles were built. Most of these were fairly quickly repainted light green, as silver was a nonsensically impractical "livery". Soe, though, survived in so-called "silver - in realty, an unsightly coatin of gunge - untiol repainted orange and black after 1962. However, the 1953 light green stock had no lining, as far as I recall; so with a single thin waistline you're either looking at a post-1955 photo. or possibly a vehicle painted to go with AEC railcar sets, which even in the earliest days never had the full top-and-lower lining. This is really quite exceptionally brilliant stuff, Harry!

The "rude words" are an essential part of all tracklaying, scratchbuilding, and many other aspects of modelling!

Those look amazing. Fair play to Roderick & Rebecca for this venture - a first in quality RTR Irish narriow gauge. The background, for those who don't know, is that Rebecca is a proud Donegal native herself!

Yes, various tanks were tried out initially but (like Kenmare) eventually found to be less satisfactory than J15s which would (as you say) monopolise both lines most of their lives, and in the case of Kenmare until closure at the end of 1959.

There are, in fact, many many many GSWR six-wheel designs not covered by any manufacturer. In the 1924 diagram book, at a time when a LOT of them had already been replaced by a large number of new bogies constructed 1900-1920, there were still some 27 separate designs. Standardisation was not a thing really until the 1960s. Many of the aforementioned were one-offs, or perhaps were members of a class of 2 or 3 examples, none of which even ever ran together - one in each of several trains, or one each on several branch lines miles away from each other. Same on the Midland, the South-eastern, and everywhere else.

The flying snail logo lasted from 1946-63, long enough. Since the brown appeared in 1970, the flying snail absolutely was only ever on grey wagons, certainly never on anything brown.

That would be an ecumenical matter.