jhb171achill

Or you could have said "Yes, please!"...........

MIGHTY stuff there, Owen. I'll be looking for a few!

Wow! I remember those.............! Very much a relic of the "Troubles" - you'd get onto a bus with hard plastic seats and a "civilian searcher" might get on and go through your stuff..... or the RUC or British troops...... and Horslips were playing in the Ulster Hall, or the Undertones in the Pound.............

Could be - several old 4.4.0s were banished there too!

Was thinking that, yes - though after the Jeeps were delivered, these locos were apparently much less seen anywhere other than the Larne line. According to the late Harold Houston of the NCC, they "couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding", so by 1950 (according to the late Nelson Poots plus jhb171Snr) were primarily found between York Road and Larne. So while I'd agree it's Ballymena, it begs the question what the loco is doing there.......probably a local passenger from Belfast. The Midland TPO is an interesting one too. I would agree that it's possibly a "cripple" normally used on the up Sligo Day Mail (as suggested above) en route to Limerick for attention. It's tempting to guess it's run a hot box and been shunted off there, As per Mayner's opinion too, I can't see one of those in use on the Sligo - Limerick line - in fact I'd lay money on it that they didn't. None of the stations had snatchers for one thing. When I travelled over that line (albeit from Ballina to Limerick, not from Sligo), mail bags were being loaded and unloaded by hand into and from the tin van on the train at Claremorris.

Correct. The UTA painted some in a light grey, dark green and (bits of) red between the GNR takeover and the mid-60s; mostly on the Derry Road, plus a few on the NCC (Antrim and Ballymoney, in particular, surviving well into NIR times). CIE, for their part, either left stations unpainted, as they had been in GNR days, on lines they had no future for, such as Oldcastle and the Dundalk - Clones - Cavan section. In other cases, they got the then-standard scheme of green (their green) and cream if repainted between 1958 and the very early 60s, but after the modernisation plan from the mid-60s they got the quite attractive and generally well-kept scheme which many of us will recall, of several shades of grey, white and black. I'm guessing, by the green, that this one might possibly be CIE.......... but who's to say it's not faded UTA! As always, this will be a fascinating thread as the story unfolds.

One of the components is not called a "crank" pin for nothing.................

Can you get real ones too? It's just that I do be gettin' hungry at these things.............

Wow - that is spectacular! The level of detail is amazing!

I'm largely on babysitting duty this weekend, Owen - but I may make it on Saturday.......

I blame @Niles Maybe he thinks I spiked his drink in Caaark, boy, the other week...........

Amazing stuff, Owen - very well done!

Looking GOOD!!!

This is outstanding stuff. Gawwd bless your eyesight!

I wanted to see this but wasn't able to log on for some reason........

I think the Macroom ones were six-wheeled, so might have been 28-30ft.....

I think only one was black, and one or two green; the rest ended their days grey. The shade of CBSCR green is unknown, though is thought by some to have not been unlike the olivey-green shade that was used at one time by the Southern Railway of England.

Ah! Got ya. I can’t answer as per the actual code, but it looks as if a standard buffer beam red would do.

How do you mean?............. explain?

Not yet, Patrick, but soon, I hope!

It’s been a busy market day. At least ten wagons of cattle for North Wall amongst this 25-wagon train….

You'd get the odd one as grubby as that - but as you suggest - very few! My recollections were that carriages on Limerick - Ballina and the Cobh branch tended to look the tattiest - though possibly because they were often the oldest still in use. I like your tin van - mine were deliberately done as filthy as the worst photos of them show! - though Silverfox - despite being told over and over again - insist on painting silver vehicles with a black roof - they should be silver - and green ones with a grey roof - THEY should be black! I have a Silverfox tin van which I asked for in green. It arrived in a very dark UTA green - which is even too dark for the early CIE green which they never carried anyway - and with a pale grey roof. I'm going to have to get it repainted. Not often I rant about a manufacturer - but for the prices this really isn't good enough. I have advised SF on several occasions about correct livery details for Irish stuff, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. Mind you, a laminate in Chinese National Railways livery would still look well on Gort! Correct. Anything - locos, coaches, PO vans or tin vans, which were put into traffic as silver, had silver everything - chassis, bogies, roofs, the lot. Anything green - in either the earlier or later green - black roofs. In black'n'tan era of course all roofs black anyway. The UTA, in contrast, had mid-to-dark grey roofs on THEIR green livery.

PM'd

Anyone got a copy of the may 1956 RM? If so, there's an article I'd like a copy of...............

I note they are offered in pairs; does this make them "double dutch"?