jhb171achill

Tis shteam stuff!

That's what I'm thinking......

I was proposing to sell a couple of surplus locomotives on fleabay shortly (still haven't decided whether I WANT to sell them or not). If I do decide to sell them, this presumably seriously dents my potential market? Say I gave them to a friend of mine in the north to sell them? Anyone know what the issues are?

Yup - I SAW that! I saw 'er going through Kilmakerril Halt at 80 mph at leasht.... sure I was on me way home from the pub.............

We may live in hope! I'm ordering a few bits from Marks Models and Hattons as we speak!

Wooden buffer beams were a feature of many classes of many locos, right up to the 1950s / 60s.... The Sligo Leitrim (with the exception of Railcar "B") tended not to move with the most modern aspects of life!

Let's HOPE it's a bluff - however - bluff or not, anyone opening or operating a business either IN Brexitland OR the rest of the world (well, the EU and China!), will be buried in new tariffs, by the look of things........thus, prices in such a new shop might have to be a lot higher than people might assume.

Personally, I think the silver, black and yellow was unattractive, but the grey isn’t the brightest either! I think for those locos - tippex livery is the nicest. But it’s your loco!

Indeed; genuinely, as one who has travelled on almost every "May Tour" since 1978, and worked on them all since 1984, I've overheard and been party to all the variations of knowledge and / or curiosity of our esteemed visitors from our neighbouring island..... (Many, of course, are SO much regulars now, they're genuine, good and lasting friends, not just "passengers"!) But I still C R I N G E at the utterly ghastly label given to this annual tour as the "International" Railtour. C'mon, lads, get a grip. It hasn't scaled the Andes, had 171 speeding across the Nullarbor Plain, or had a side trip to Darjeeling or the Harz system yet, and No. 4 has yet to see a Norfolk Southern goods yard. Good old 186 has never ascended the Devils Nose, nor had a photo-op hooked up to the Blue Train in De Aar. No. 461 hasn't crossed Glenfinnan Viaduct or rolled into Zurich Hauptbanhhof yet, and with the covid an'all, that's not going to happen any time soon.

Double cringe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I recall, on an RPSI May Tour in the 1990s, I was doing the (crowded!) bar the whole weekend. At the counter, a crowd of the usual suspects were waxing lyrical with all the bar-room intellectualism that accompanies such scenes. One well-known bar-room bore, who will remain nameless, was regaling several of our English visitors with various "wisdom".... talk was of "LONDONderry", "Eire", and a long discussion took place among them about the exact spot at which we entered a "foreign country" at the border, and precisely where it was. Now, I'm the only sober one among them - I'm working! They're all poleaxed. I'm bored, but perversely curious as to what would come next. Our attention-seeking bar-room intellectual was eventually silenced, and politely advised that he was speaking from, let us say, an opening not normally used for speech - by one of the English guys on the tour! Hilarious stuff........and no, I don't remember what livery the dining car was at that time! But yes, I pored over that book in class in school, when I should have been listening to French verbs; stuff about the capitals of European countries; the history of...some boring old stuff about wars....; the economy of Canada and the USA; genitive, perfect, imperfect and pluperfect tenses; the scribblings of Wordsworth; the main points of a map of the route of the River Rhine; calculus, sines and cosines and algebra........... Not a word about railways, of course, in any of that oul guff, as I saw it back then! But Boocock's images of a filthy "C" class in Wisht Caaark, boy, with a couple of 1880s six-wheelers behind it, or some of his atmospheric Donegal and Sligo-Leitrim images....YES!

I think it was three, with the other seven remaining as they were.

Yes, it was. They re-did the livery to "tippex" style too.

Internally, different generators. Externally, apart from livery changes, the rebuilt ones had those ugly "appendages" stuck onto the ends. Gawd knows what was in them, but it doesn't matter - you can't see inside them!

Full, normal passenger and goods trains 1963. Goods and occasional passenger excursions / special trains into the mid 70s. Finished by early 80s.

Since the early 1950s, in other words for the larger part of a century, Limerick - Rosslare has been the most disgracefully blatant example of this. Today, it would take about two weeks to get from Limerick - Rosslare. Any time a cobweb appears on the points at Clonmel, there's a full H & S alert, and they close the line for six months, and dress everyone within 6km either side of the line in dayglow. Everything that moves, including push-bikes, have to be painted yellow and certified. Then there's the consultant's survey (€560,000) and then they remove the cobweb (€48,000 per web plus mileage and overnight allowances for, well, just about anyone on the local census returns going back to the Famine). God forbid that it be run like a viable railway.

“A round trip into Eire”....... cringe!!!!!

Indeed: one wonders if that it the strategy in recent years with the Nenagh branch. Run as few trains on it as you can, at the single most utterly useless times, as slowly as you can, with the worst rolling stock you have, and cancel the service as often as possible to allow maximum expenditure on “maintenance” work. Result: no income, astronomical costs. NTA and Irish Rail win, achieve their aim to get it closed, then lifted as soon as possible. Get the greenway down, and a strategic station mid-line bulldozed to make a huge Tesco so that it can’t ever be reopened. Job done.

Dunno about Norwegians - CIE had their own teams of painters, and a small number of stations were done in that red and cream for a shirt time - as you say, that was exactly the reason - to artificially inflate maintenance costs!

Any idea if the station & signal cabin are still standing?

Confirms my suspicions! And then CIE copied this grey and yellow on some touring buses............. If we try to put on the heads of CIE people at the time, the "silver" had clearly been a monumental disaster, and both locos and rolling stock which entered traffic that way were being repainted in green at as fast a rate of knots as could be attained. Thus, had GM not painted them at all, it is probable that they would have entered traffic in plain green, the way the A, C and B101 classes were being painted at the time. One for a modeller, some time? It certainly would not look any worse than a grubby grey and yellow one! The 1960s black and tan, and 1990s "tippex" liveries were, in my humble opinion, the most attractive on these.

There was. Dundalk Works cast them, as did York Road for the NCC and, of course, Inchicore. York Road MAY have made some for the County Donegal, but I have no evidence of this.

Provided that these preservation-era pics are correctly done (not always a "given"!), it would appear to be the same grey. I wonder if EMD had supplied large numbers of locos to these two companies by the time the 121s were being built? It would not be without precedent for manufacturer-originated liveries to become standard on the railway of a customer. Right back at the start of railways, manufacturers like Bury, Curtis & Kennedy, would supply locomotives painted their way, and the railway companies would just "run" with that. There seems no obvious reason why a CIE system so wedded to the colours green and dark grey - on absolutely EVERYTHING - would switch to what in fact was a very impractical livery of light shades for a working railway vehicle. Indeed, with existing Crossley diesels proving to be even more filthy than neglected steam engines, they could have been forgiven for ordering them in plain black.

Don't tell Donald you're using Sharpies! SUPERB job with the nameplate.

Those clips just scream out to have a credit at the end "Copyright IRRS (J. St. Leger Collection)" added to it! The old turf vehicles are superb, down to the ancient GSR class markings "3" on the doors. The ends with the bottom bits sheeting over the rotten parts - those carriages must have looked fascinatingly shabby in real life.... The GSR maroon would be faded to an insipid dirty, salmony pink - with unpainted planks all over them too! But the black and white adds to the atmosphere. The still photos even, could have "H C Casserley" under them! Superb stuff.