jhb171achill

I had often considered Irish "N" gauge, Dropshort, but like you I would find it too small.... With space an issue for many nowadays, I wonder is there, however, a future in it?

Brilliant stuff, iarnrod, thanks!

That's a different kettle'o'fish! Yes, 140 existed.... as above..... And yet, amongst horse boxes in the 1923 list, there's no 160 either! Inclusion in earlier or later lists must prove existence, of course, so one wonders where it was hiding in 1923....

Just delving a bit... For NCC / UTA modellers, the following are fine, but you'd have to add gangways to them: DAPOL Ref. nos. 4P 010 002,3,4 & 6. Not the brake-ended ones. Just add gangways! If NCC-ing, just get rid of the crests and replace LMS with LMS NCC. If GSR, get rid of crests and lettering, and put numerals for class on door. Otherwise, CIE green of either type pre or post 1955. Bredins - DAPOL REf. 4P 010 007 and 011. RATIO reference nos. 610 and 612, which are kits of GWR long wheelbase four wheelers. Just about long enough to look 6-wheel-ish with appropriate chassis. West Cork and early GSWR had some six wheelers as short as 24ft, which must have been a severe knee-knocking exercise with whoever was opoosite you - unless you were both midgets. The BCDR thirds were like this too - very uncomfortable for long journeys indeed. In the wagon arena, Dundas' PC08A is a reasonable approximation of a GNR 1954-build cement van (used as general goods vans by CIE right until mid 70s, with an "N" after the number, e.g. one I saw at Templemore in 1976, 66N. Their PC 87 is an LMS cattle truck. Not at all the design of CIE (we await this in kit form, hopefully!) but as close as anything proprietary is. It must be remembered that any pre-1963 Irish railway layout will need cattle trucks, and often cattle specials! No fertiliser or cement (other than in sacks in normal goods vans), acrylonitrile, dolomite, shale, andydrous ammonia, magnesite, Taras or the like back then.....!

I had a look in the GSWR diagram book of 1923 which I have and there's no mention of a vehicle of that number at all, let alone a TPO! So the plot thickens; was this thing a conversion, and if so, when and why?

I wondered about that!

The very best of luck, Tony. These things can indeed take time and experimentation. I'm sure something great will emerge!

Does the Silver Fox one have the small window option too? I thought theirs were all larger window....even though some are numbered for the earlier series...? I always had a soft spot for these locos - though many railwaymen didn't!

It's the colour of new ballast, Tony, which I suspect would not have been in abundance in Omagh goods yard within your period! I would mix with other types perhaps, and weather it when all put in place. Oil and coal dust, general wear and tear, and (within the yard) a good degree of a trampling effect, i.e. not crisp and pristine, flattened down a lot, would be evident too. Add a few small weeds at the ends of the sidings and in corners and there ye go!

Many thanks, folks. Barl - if technical accuracy is the main thing, obviously the brass kits are the best. I tried gluing one together once, but it was a 009 gauge 4-wheeler, a much smaller thing. If technical accuracy is not paramount, and as you say the "look" is what you want to go for (and possibly financial economy too) I would think in terms of cutting up second hand old Hornby chassis to use with bought coach sides as mention d above. This covers bogies too. For a straightforward repainting, any model of the LMS Stanier coaches is a reasonable approximation to some Bredins. Beware of brake seconds of British origin, though. In Ireland it was always more common to have a separate van, and in the grey / green era this tended to be an old wooden six wheel brake 3rd or full brake, or in the later part of that period a tin van. There were SOME brake 2nds and brake 3rds (very few brake 1sts) but these would be wooden, not Bredin or Laminate style. The British non-corridor suburban stock can sometimes vaguely resemble one type of GSWR third, but would need gangways. While the 1333 series Bredins were built as suburban for the DSER, they were very quickly given corridors within GSR days. Thus, no "modern" coaches ever ran without gangways in CIE times. As I mentioned initially, a fairly reasonably priced 6-wheel chassis would be a great help too.

That is an absolute beauty, Nelson. When I was the DCDR's Finance Officer for some years, I put together a rough plan on how to create a replica one of these on the chassis of a NCC "Brown Van". There are about half a dozen brown van chassis there, or at least there were at the time. The purpose was, just for my own interest, to cost it to see whether it was feasible or not for the railway. the proposal never got to committee stage, let alone being put into action, as I just had too much else to do and I never finished the drawings. The van would have had to have been somewhat shorter than the original, but not much.

Further to my above mumblings, here are a few of possible interest: Roxey LCDR Van, LSWR non-corridor bogie, SECR bogie compo. Ratio - GWR four wheel coaches, kit nos. 610, 612 & 613. Add something to build up the lower part of the ends to avoid the "turned-in" effect. Possibly, one and a half of these would make a 30ft coach - didn't measure it..... Mix and mingle with a silver laminate, a tin van and an old Bredin, and hey presto!

With the (very welcome) growing interest in the "Grey & Green Era", i.e. just before the "Black & Tan Era", which is now evident, I was thinking about what coaches would be suitable on such a layout. It is an excellent period for modelling - probably the best in fact - due to a mixture of steam and diesel, ancient wooden coaches of both bogie and six-wheeled varieties, and the sheer variety in both passenger and goods trains. The vast majority of both had barely two items of rolling stock of the same type. We're looking at the late 1940s through to about 1963, when steam ended on CIE. The UTA (also with grey wagons and green coaches!) was just as diversified, with the added interest of a motley fleet of railcars of many different types, including some one-offs like former NCC No. 1 (now at Whitehead). My curiosity was aroused by Noel's old repaint of an elderly Triang coach into black'n'tan, featured here recently, and Mike84C's article some time ago about converting two old Hornby "Thomas the Tank" carriages into a very credible version of a GSWR six-wheeled first. Clearly, a great variety of coaches is necessary to create an accurate look for the period. The UTA aspect is easier, as there are now kits for GNR and NCC types of vehicles, plus AEC & BUT railcars. I am unaware of any MPD cars, but some varieties of this species can be made reasonably convincingly by surgical procedures on some types of bought LMS coaches. CIE - someone really needs to produce a decent six wheel chassis! Manufacturers might comment? We have recently seen an excellent start made on Bandon, and an existing masterpiece of Ballyshannon and hopefully we'll see more of this era. So what can we use, other than the painstaking procedure of building actual models of actual carriages from scratch? In terms of "new" stuff, we have IFM's Park Royals and Bredins, and now there are several kits of laminates available. (The new IFM laminate brake is too late for the 1950s, but the full standard coach is just right). Worsley Works do the "scratch aid" kits for a GNR K15, which in the 1958-63 period could be seen on a number of lines on CIE, particularly the DSER. They also do several nice GSWR six-wheel kits, but you'd have to be a brass-proficient modeller to assemble them. (Dare we call such folks "brass necked"?) But I was in Mark's Models yesterday and noticed the Roxey kit, for about €10, of a grounded coach body. This appears to be modelled on either a GWR or Midland Rly (England) design, as it has curved-in ends. The only railway company in Ireland to design carriages like this was the WLWR, and many of their coaches didn't survive long into the 1901 amalgamation with the GSWR. But - with a Mike84C type job, two of these together could make a credible bogie coach, or a West Cork style short wheelbase 6-wheeler. These would NOT be accurate models of anything, but would look the part, with design features not unlike those of GSWR-era Inchicore. There are a number of Roxey plastic kits which can be "botched" to make models at least as convincing as those mentioned initially, which thus create the "feel" of the period without being necessarily strictly accurate. The beauty about such a system is that each model would be a one-off, exactly suitable for train make-ups of the day, where a brand new laminate might sit with an 1887 Midland six wheeler, a new tin van, and an old GSWR side corridor bogie. Curiously, while MGWR six wheelers saw out the six-wheel era (the last runs being in 1963), MGWR bogies did not fare so well despite being just as well built. However, a few were to be seen; there was a beautiful side corridor composite in West Cork - pure Broadstone - in the 1950s. So, sides of suitable donor vehicles are well available. We just need a good six wheel chassis of scale 30ft length.......buffer to buffer that equates to 128mm in 00 scale.

Absolutely top class work. They look great! If you ever decide to weather them, if memory serves the exhaust made quite a mess around it!

Pints available? Excellent - we'll all call round later.

No matter what the colour, it shows how a simple repaint can change the character of a model entirely! Looks well.

Dare I say "Up the Dubs!"?

Looking good - great weathering job.

Excellent news!

The carriages will be interesting. One or two green laminates or Park Royals as railcar intermediates, but also perhaps a couple of 45' bogies of indeterminate origin! The brake would be either a brand new tin van or an elderly ex-MGWR six wheeled passenger brake or brake 3rd....

Very good point.

Really outstanding photos as always - but: I read elsewhere today someone complaining - rightly - that some photo-sharing site had taken down all their pictures, and a few years ago this happened on a grand scale with some other website, where people had put enormous effort in putting up quite huge collections of their photos. Maybe I'm many steps behind the pack here, but I presume that all who post on things like flickr or Dropbox or equivalents, have retained their valuable work on memory sticks and other forms of media? A few years ago, VHS video, despite its shakiness and graininess, was hailed as the way to go for the future. Now it, along with the mini-cassettes that followed, are ancient history and you can barely even get a VHS player now. With so many forms of media nowadays, and not one lasting more than a few years in popularity, it appears that it is good sense to retain one's photos in several forms together.....

In an off-board conversation with a highly respected colleague this afternoon, the matter came up of "brown or bauxite" in regard to CIE / IE wagons. Definitions on paper of what constitutes "bauxite" seem to vary, so let's put it like this. If we take the majority view that "bauxite" is a mid brown with a distinct reddish tint, then it is a new phenomenon as far as IE is concerned, and was never used at all by CIE. The reddish shade used now is of comparatively recent origin, most often seen now as a background for painted numerals on modern stock, which (like UTA in the sixties) rarely if ever is entirely repainted. Against a brown surface liberally coated in brake dust, it looks almost red. CIE used a mid brown, and this continued well into IE days, until - I would guess - early 2000s. Thus, anything before that, and certainly everything without exception which constitutes CIE goods stock was not bauxite, but brown. A good source of what this looked like can be seen on many pages of colour books of the period, or among Brian Flannigan's or Ernie ("irishswissernie") Brack's excellent flickr collections. If anyone is familiar with the bizarre collection of sidelined wagons at Limerick, there is this oddball-goods-brake van, converted for some purpose it appears never to have been used for, and with the ends removed. THAT is painted a bauxite colour - but no CIE wagon of any sort, let alone a guard's van, ever carried that colour, any more than it did LNER loco green! I hope this helps.

Lukas - are any of your Cravens in original livery? (Don't want the 1st class one). PM me?

Might there be some way to incorporate "short journeys" to and from the Omagh markets branch?