jhb171achill

Indeed! GNR 93 is actually the only other potential alternative. "Lough Erne" is a shell, and BCDR 30 in Cultra is little better.

Excellent news; a point of order, though, if I may: the GNR 2.4.2T in Cultra is another surviving br4anch line loco...it and its type worked on the Belturbet branch regularly.....

Few of them had snails - only the first lot…. I can produce a suitable photo from Fry’s stuff - will try to find it. Most spent most of their lives with no logos, so your kits are 100% fine!

Correct. No Bullied wagon ever carried any logo on the side. Some of the first had a small snail stencil on the (grey) CHASSIS, but that didn’t last long.

That looks absolutely amazing. You can smell the sea air and chipper van….

Yes, those pics are indeed the junction. I didn’t explain well - I meant he got to Rathkenny…..

Yes

If EVER there was an ecumenical matter, that nails it….

Display purposes only?

The catering trolley will contain real chocolate model KitKats, for display purposes only.

At that stage and for a good twenty years earlier, almost nothing but the odd cattle or GAA special had gone in there. It remained through the 1950s as one of those sleepy railway backwaters like Dingle, Mountmellick, Castlecomer, Cashel, Athboy or Clara-Streamstown.

Hydrogen powered 071 Something MGWR Something NIR 131 Thats my guesses…..

Absolutely outstanding stuff. Love the WTT. Once Dugort is finished, if I can ever retrieve it from an attic now filled with luggage, it will operate to the Albert Quay - Bantry WTT on some days, and an adapted version of the the Kenmare one on others….

Best of luck with what looks like a great project!

Absolutely horrified to hear today of the sudden death of Fred Dean of Cork, who will be well known to some of us. More into bus models and IRRS matters than railways, he was nonetheless a familiar sight. Sympathies to his family. RIP.

Absolutely top notch, as always with Holman productions! I love the carriages. One newly painted maroon, another so shabby it's covered in brownish brake dust, the other in the absolutely atrocious state that one of the trio actually WAS in - bare wood showing, and what paint there was still visible was so faded, worn, weathered and dirty it could have been originally tartan and pink for all anybody might have known...... gawd knows what the interior was like! The SLNCR's traffic manager told jhbSenior that he would rather borrow GNR or CIE stock for non-railcar passenger operations, he was so embarrassed by the state of their few remaining operable coaches. One of the bogies, and the shabbiest of all, brake 3rd no. 4, at least got a decent new coat of maroon not that long before the line closed. But apart from that, the easiest job on the whole railway in those days must have been the SLNCR (or, for that matter, CDRJC!) painter!

Now THAT is a work of art!!! How did you do the criss-cross timberwork in the middle section?

Note the CIE open wagon. It would be interesting to know how far beyond Enniskillen CIE / GSR / erstwhile GSWR (WLWR) and MGWR stock penetrated into the GNR. Much to derry via Omagh, no doubt; but elsewhere? Certainly, flying snails were no stranger to Enniskillen - including on coaches. When the SLNCR had excursions they often borrowed a few MGWR six wheelers from Sligo.

I'm looking at this now. The info I have is that this is one of my grandfather's photos - that much is correct, but the implication is, of course, that this means that he took it. However, here lies a puzzle. The guy in the driver's position is almost certainly him, so either there was some sort of timer on the camera (which I very much doubt) or he set it up on a tripod to get someone else to press the shutter. He often accompanied locomotives that were just out of Inchicore on trial runs, especially when he had been involved in the design drawings for whatever amendment was being done. But that does not for one second explain the garb. There are other family pictures - quite a few - among his collection showing him attired like this, but after years of looking at that pic I only noticed the figures in the cab today. So what on earth was going on..... I have no idea. The young fella to his left could be one of a set of cousins from Co Offaly - jhbSenior was only born in 1918. I'll need to get this image looked at again and enlarged more. It's an old glass plate neg, which is why it's so clear.

Senior's dad, i.e. HJAB of Inchicore, took this in Cobh about 1915 / 20.

For people with A class dirty minds, Senior took this pic - yes, of a diesel - about 1990. It is so dirty that he probably thought it was a steam engine underneath........

Goodbye to the “hellfire” and “thrash”! Wonder how the preserved ones will fare…..!

Correct, Leslie, they became essentially a full part of the CIE "H" van fleet and were treated as such. In fact, to a modeller, they are even more important in that role as they would be as GNR cement vans. Cement vans were limited in what they did or where they went - but in CIE guise these vans could - and did - turn up literally everywhere on standard goods traffic. I would guess they even briefly made it to Wisht Caark. They were to be seen on UTA goods on the Derry Road and to Belfast for the short last few years of goods traffic to those places. And your faded GNR lettering about returning to Drogheda is spot on - while it wasn't intended to show through the new CIE grey paint, often these things did; it would not be unusual either to see a faint trace of a large "G" behind the CIE roundel. The "slap of grey paint" could indeed be just that (though it covered the chassis too )...... All in all a lovely addition to your range! Congrats again!

No, unless he gave them away before he died. I know that the handful of models still owned by his family don't contain any road vehicles. His railway-liveried road models consist of the above, a GNR lorry and a Dinky toy bus in CIE green. All are Dinky toys except the one above which is Minic. Other than that, his vehicles were just ordinary Dinky toy cars etc of the day. he didn't repaint anything else that I can think of. Today I listed and catalogued the very last of the bits and pieces in his spares box - down to broken signal posts, etc., so at this stage it would seem that no further material is likely to come to light, though I am following up one more lead at present. It would be interesting to see models of the pre-IOC buses indeed. Intrigued by the story of a model T on the CVR - never heard of that...... Senior recalled seeing the little ones on the DBST all right - they used to go out that way for summer picnics.

Worry not……. You’re the last man on the planet that anyone could call “lazy”!