jhb171achill

I could add a few other things which need to be borne in mind. Ireland doesn't have large tonnages of anything, let alone over long distances. We don't have long distances full stop. No coal, no huge opencast mines. A dozen wagons out of Tara is irrelevant commercially. I lament the onset of all these railcars (as I strongly suspect Derailed probably does too!) but if we're to have any railways at all, they must be run as cheaply as possible. And that leaves no room at all for BR style additional layers of shareholders, regulatory bodies, and friends of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael being paid €678,000 a year to "oversee" it all, as a shiny private company with (here's another) a colossal campaign of advertising, paid for indirectly by the taxpayer. So there's €3m budget up for grabs. Option 1: spend it on track and station upgrades Option 2: spend €1.1m on consultants fees, dividends, directors salaries and bonuses - we mustn't forget the bonuses.... and €1.9m on track and station upgrades. Make no mistake about this, folks. Look at Irish Water. We all need to be prepared to campaign loudly and long. Mayner makes the point that we can't have it both ways. Absolutely correct. However, special examples can exist Europe-wide, and this may well be a very good example.

Where do we go from here? RPSI website for the next trip to Ballykay, that's where.....

If this is a "newbie", it's a seriously impressive one! Well done timmycork, great progress.

Black'n'tan TGV's? Harz mountain steam locos with flying snails.....! Seriously, all the above points are perfectly valid. Ireland has six million people. One third of them live in the greater Belfast, Dublin and Cork areas. Derry, Galway, Limerick and Waterford are the next biggest cities; but all four have populations between 85000 and 100000. If we count those plus their immediate hinterlands, it shows us that just seven centres on this island account for 40% of the island population. By international standards, only Dublin is a significantly sized city. Many countries - whether with privately or publicly run railways, would have abandoned the less used ones years ago. Just saying! It's no coincidence that the Cork-Dublin-Belfast lines carry the lion's share of traffic. The survival of so many other lines has, unfortunately, more to do with the poor road system in the recent past, than any notion that there's loads of commercially viable traffic out there if only the railway would look. There's loads of traffic all right, but it's not COMMERCIALLY viable. Hence the dilemma. Now - our government has a choice (and such privatisation directives will affect NIR too; it's just as much an EU railway as IE is) - allow all comers in and pay them whatever their bloated privatised bosses want, or say "sorry, lads; what IE got is all you're getting". Let's hope it's the latter. Another thing: in a country this size, there are no duplicated routes and no room for competition. As our transatlantic friends might say; "Go figure"!

That's just unbelievable. That's the very top end of modelling in all respects.

If the Government is worried - and rightly so - surely they can insist that the existing subsidy they give to IE will not be increased by one red cent. That way, no commercial operator - presumably - would want to touch it!

The SLNCR did indeed run an extremely tight ship, but it's gone; reason - it was an example of an industry which, given conditions in Ireland (low population density outside Dublin, and very little bulk goods e.g. coal), cannot stand on its own commercial feet without state funding. In other words, it was private as in privatised as such, a commercial business. The LLSR was the same and so was the CDRJC. If we look at the receipts of all Irish railway lines, or even just stick to the amount of commercially viable traffic likely to offer, even theoretically, we can see that had the state never become involved through the admittedly inefficient and anti-rail UTA and to a lesser extent CIE, there wouldn't be a yard of railway open for fifty years or more. I agree with Derailed that CIE has hardly had a good track record, though lack of government funding to CIE is the major problem. If some portion of whatever state money there is, becomes diverted towards company directors and their inevitably obscenely high salaries, and related regulatory quangos, then whatever chance the Nenagh and Waterford-Limerick lines have had will evaporate overnight.

The very occasional one could be seen in original BR livery in the 70s. They were on four wheeled flats at that time. Top picture, page 12, 4th wagon, "Rails Through the West". I recall seeing these on the Belfast goods train from Dundalk, and also around the North Wall yard.

Cue the taxpayer forking out to (a) run the service, through the inevitably necessary subsidies to private operators, and (b) line the pockets of obscenely overpaid company directors, regulatory bodies to watch over the private operators, and shareholders. Far fetched? Look across the water. The former BR costs WAAY more to run now, even in comparative terms, and is arguably less efficient. Privatisation of an industry which cannot in reality cover its own costs almost by definition - is mad. This is not "free market economics" - this is utter madness, born of idealistic, but totally unrealistic, political thought; like comparative examples elsewhere it will cost the taxpayer dearly.

That would be an unmitigated disaster.

I've a notion that there's some old BR class being rebuilt this way in the UK - possibly as an experiment, though? Not sure otherwise....

New maps needed! Derry - Belfast - Dublin - Cork - Bantry......

An excellent publication, indeed; have it myself. Norman was a true gentleman, and his sons who now run the business are absolutely chips off the old block.

I'll have a grey one and a black'n'tan one....

C'mon the kettles! Railcars out..... glorified trams! ;-)

You have to put two fewer rings on their tails to get them within scale......

Wow! Looks perfect, Leslie!

Yes, the first lot of "E"'s.... correct, Jawfin...

Looks fantastic! I had a soft spot for those railcars.... though I could never work out where the coal was meant to be fed in, or where the boiler was.....

Phil The narrow gauge engines were always grey, all through GSR and CIE times. Several, especially on the C & L, didn't receive a new coat of paint from pre 1925 days until well into the thirties, but that's not the same as GSR or CIE painting them differently. While on the T & D, every locomotive was plain grey, without exception. T & D Nos. 3, 4 & 6 were on the C & L (can't recall if other T & D locos went there too), and all were grey on arrival. No. 6, at least, appears blackish in one good colour photo I've seen, but on closer inspection - on the very few clean bits there are - grey is evident. On coal trains, with coal dust flying about at Arigna, and smoke drifting about Ballinamore shed, aided and abetted by an almost total lack of any sort of cleaning, grey could look almost like a dirty black pretty quickly. The shade is like a dark wagon grey; if you look at recent colour pictures of the RPSI's 186, that's very accurate. Watch, however, the smokebox - apparently, many at Whitehead thought that a grey smokebox and chimney looked odd, so they tended not to clean it like they did the rest of the loco, giving an impression in some photos that the smokebox is black! But it isn't, and wouldn't have been; the GSR / CIE grey encompassed absolutely everything, motion and all, except solely for the red buffer beams. Numerals on the T & D locos were cast plates while on the T & D, pale yellow painted numerals while on the C & L.

True, Old Blarney; forgot about those.

Gents, including those who PM's me, my two are in 1960s black and tan, and are B141 and B162. I've decided to retain them for the moment but now that I know that several people are interested I may advertise them in the future. Thanks for your interest.

When 461 was first restored about 1990, she appeared out of Whitehead with a cream / yellow unlined "snail". This seems to have been the start of assumptions that such livery details - as applied to something preserved - may be relied on to be accurate. in fact, not only was it not, but the engine was never black in CIE ownership. This is, as a separate issue, why it's incumbent on preservationists to make it clear whether a livery they turn something out in is accurate or not. The incorrect black ironwork on the brake van "Ivan" is another unfortunate case in point. Snails were always "eau-de-nil", rather than cream. if the colour is reproduced accurately, it should look like light green, and should be lined in gold, unlike the cabside numbers which were unlined light yellow! I suspect, but of course could be entirely wrong, that various manufacturers looked at a restored 461 twenty years ago and assumed that a pale yellow logo was correct, especially as the cabside number was that colour.

It would be interesting to see a photo of it in BR red and cream, as it apparently was with British Rail....

Haven't decided whether to sell yet, but would there be interest in a couple of black'n'tan ones?