jhb171achill

Absolutely fascinating layout. Trains and buses. Whew! I'm not the only desert-sand enthusiast; that's a good few out of the closet now! My earliest memories, of course, were of green buses with "flying snails", and UTA green ones up north.

Can you still get those kits anywhere?

Very impressive start!

Well, that's always the best reason of the lot to run them, Mike! They were a very individual type of wagon.

True, Broithe...

The only BR Mk 1's in Ireland were the CIE genny vans, I think. All else Mk 2, 3 or 4.

Great to meet chevron yesterday!

To all who offered new homes to the above stuff, it was posted yesterday and today. Perhaps I could ask each of you to let me know when you get it.

Italian trains with no graffiti! There's a first......

Indeed, josefstadt. The brown vans in those days weren't even common sights on the former GNR lines - they stayed mostly on home territory. I remember the goods trains in the Belfast / Lisburn area very well, but I personally never once saw one of these vans in a goods train.

I've seen pics taken in the Harcourt Street area in the early fifties showing a siding of spare stock for the line - all Midland six wheelers and a GSWR bogie, as far as I could make out. Even in the late fifties, I've seen a photo of an AEC set with one of these Midland six wheelers tagged onto the end. A photo of a suburban train at Killiney in the 50s shows a mix of just about everything, but as far as I could see only one vehicle was a "native". This is interesting for anyone modelling the Dublin area in this period.

To go back to the original post, it's theoretically possible, of course, that a brown van might have ended up somewhere unusual, but it would be an exception, a one-off. Immediately after the GNR was split up in 1958, a GNR coach, still in brown, ended up for a very short time on - of all places - the West Cork system. I have a photo of a DSER goods van in a siding at Achill, and I saw a pic once of a CIE wagon in a train on the Larne line in the early 1960s.

Yes...... look at photographs of a train in CIE days on a former MGWR or GSWR route, and you'll see more than a few carriages of the original companies, interspersed with Park Royal, laminates and Bredins. But on the DSER, the older stock is as likely to be GSWR origin as anything. And, of course, it was a smaller company than the Midland or GSW in the first place.

jhb171 Senior recalled quite a few GSWR six wheelers on the Harcourt Street line as early as the late 1920s, which would certainly fit well with the idea of the "native" coaches not being in the best order. One might guess that the GSR withdrew some DSER coaches more or less straight away.

DSER stock seems to have been much less successful at surviving than GSWR or MGWR stuff...

I'm completely with you, Leslie; I, too, am now the proud owner of a magnified slide viewer, glasses, and a magnifying glass! I agree, a visit south of Belfast in ncc days, or portadown in UTA days, by a "brown van" is highly unlikely, and certainly not south or west of Dublin.

That's the GSWR's erstwhile Farranfore - Valentia line, closed in 1960. Highly scenic indeed.

I was several years off becoming a bump!

Absolutely brilliant job!

Indeed, Wrenn! Worth hanging on to!

Completed - and appreciated.

Going through Senior's stuff, an old handwritten note in pencil on a bit of exercise book paper, looks like they were scribbled down during a couple of railway journeys, way back in the 1930s...... "Points replaced by GS at bridge beyond Maynooth Coach 2115 seen, wagon 23062 9001 Saw 378 at Donamon, saw 375 at Athlone 628 350 176" Another note tracks a car journey, with timings given at Lusk, an AA Box, Swords, Cloghran etc, all the way from Rush, in north Co. Dublin, to Ballsbridge. The journey took fifty minutes "via Butt Bridge and South Wall". There was no port tunnel then - nor was there much traffic! Even so, that was fairly getting a move on, given the way the roads were then.... Any retired gardai reading this, avert your eyes....

Mr Nelson, as Chairman of the LNER, I offer you a job as head of our wagon building works. I know there's a bit of a commute involved though, and do remember we are narrow gauge over here......

The weathering is spot on, Nelson. In late UTA days - which you mention as your period, no amount of weathering is too much; any wagons remaining in traffic were almost all, cosmetically speaking, in as awful a state as anything on rails ever has been!

By road, though, it's a shorter distance. While I agree with Weshty, I think that a top speed of 100mph isn't enough. When you allow your an average four to five intermediate stops, you'd need a cruising speed (not "top" speed) of 125 mph to compete with road. Not only on the Cork line, but also on the Galway and Belfast lines. Ideally, on the Mayo road, Waterford line, Athenry to Limerick and the South Eastern too, but that's never going to even be considered.