One of the only reasons that the Dugort Harbour branch survived the 1953 closures was the CIE bus and lorry garage, built near the harbour by the GSR Road Motor Services in 1938. Every couple of weeks a tanker of diesel wends its way down from Castletown, to where it has arrived on the 03:45 goods from Tralee.
Prior to the construction of the new bus depot in town in the 1970s this was still the case. Here we see B141 returning to Castletown West one warm early summer morning in 1968, with the empty tanker to go back to Tralee. A rarely photographed working, as it was all over before most local bed and breakfasts had finished serving.
By now, very few brake vans still have a “snail” on them, and almost all have the black and yellow stripes on the ducket. But not this one, which tends not to stray off the Harbour branch….