jhb171achill

That gentleman in England also has a 45mm gauge model of SLNCR "B" on his garden railway. Excellent model - I think it must be battery operated.

North City Mills, shunted by GSR / CIE; Courtaulds, Carrickfergus - had three steam locos of their own. Guinness was of course a special case, with 5ft 3 and narrow gaugeas well... Achill Island had two 2ft gauge lines it two quarries. One had two steam locos and the other was horse worked.

Ah, Enniscorthyman, this means you'll have to come back to Downpatrick to film it again!

Tis the one, Bosk!

The sentinels were steam powered things... Have seen pics of them somewhere.

Anyone seen the latest offering from the Rubberbandits?

Minister, that is indeed the Dromod one.

I've done a lot of delving through GSR boardroom minute books over the years and while I most certainly have by no means come across all material on all incidents, this one remains elusive to me! Given the cash strapped nature of the GSR, I think it's highly unlikely a whole loco was left there. Maybe bits of it? In any event, I'd be interested to know if there actually is any mileage in this...

The sugar co. did indeed hire them.

I'm pretty certain, from what I heard around Inchicore in the late 70s / early 80s, that it was scrapped on site there. Bogies, chassis, the lot. Shame, though...

Neil's stuff is top notch!

Indeed, Wrenn..... Now where are my pills and false teeth...... I know I left them here somewhere......

Am I the only one that finds that it takes ages to download flickr photos / albums?

Wrenn - I had completely forgotten it was 0 gauge!!!!!!!

Downpatrick's 1944 is one of the last set - in fact one of the last two.

Memory jogged. Saw blue Lino some thirty and more years ago when it was at Limerick junction. It was a dull pale blue from what I remember. Don't worry about the asbestos - I ate it all that day......

West Cork?

Surely, with such emphasis on producing the superb Irish r-t-r and kit models, there might be a case to be made for at least the production of a limited amount of scale 5ft 3 track and points?

Jawfin, Garfield & Co.; glad you enjoyed it.

Let's hope they get a few Murphy's Models 141 & 071 class locos and appropriate stock. Their home made "Supertrain" isn't the same level of accuracy as Cyril Fry's models.

Entirely grey until early fifties when a very small number of the overall total got lined green. From mid fifties some were repainted grey, others black.

The very steepest gradients in Ireland were the quarter mile just short of Hillsborough station in the Knockmore Junction side and the cutting just south of Downpatrick station, through which it will one day become possible to travel again by train. These were 1 in sixty-ish - I'd have to look it up. One in sixty - for example - would be one inch rise per sixty inches (or five feet / about 1.5m) length. A model railway will comfortably cope with gradients three times this steep.

You're quite right, minister - I had forgotten that. 00n3 or TT is indeed what's needed. There was a lot of dual gauge track in Larne Harbour station at one time. After the last remaining bit of the Ballymena & Larne closed in 1950, fragments remained about the yard almost until its removal in the early 1960s. At Strabane, one might have expected the same, but it was nit so, other than a wagon turntable. The Derry docks had a lot, and the RPSI's 0.6.0T "R H Smyth" had a narrow gauge chopper coupling set off centre on each buffer beam so that it could haul CDR or LLSR stick as well as NCC or GNR stock around the quays.

Stevie, what is known is that the tender it arrived at Whitehead with is not what it ran with. Rumours abounded for years at Whitehead that it came from a 400, but this is nonsense! In GSR, let alone CIE days, tenders were swopped. This was common in other countries too. I remember seeing steam locos in Indonesia in the 80s at the end of steam. The particular livery they had involved having the loco number on the loco itself and the tender. So you got B5002 paired with the tender from B5008, B5004 with B5010 and so on. CIE and GSR were no exception to this. The GNR numbered tenders in a separate series because they knew they'd be swopped. However, swops were generally within a class (but not always). CIE inherited a wide range of non standard locos, so swopping between classes was quite common as well as between locos within a class. It's probably impossible to say at this stage where 186s tender originated, but we can be sure that it would have travelled around behind many locos of several classes! Photographic evidence shows that this type of tender was often found with the J15 class. It may well have designed with them in mind, or not!

009 is the same 9mm gauge but with narrow gauge sleeper spacing might look a lot better?