jhb171achill

PRICELESS!! Guess what my grandson will be viewing tomorrow.....

Awkward to maintain, less reliable and very noisy, but……. YES! Bring ‘em back! Far more comfortable (with ear muffs) than ANY modern vehicle!

Carriages with doors in the middle would be better…..

It would be no worse than the “direct curve” on NIR at Great Victoria Street - and little sharper than Cork…..

Indeed; in the EARLY 60s the wooden ones would have outnumbered the Bullieds - but not for long.

All true; and in all reality - you mention London - the ONLY way is underground. With every street on the surface having a finite width, we can reorganise them till we're blue in the face to take cycleways, trams, traffic, buses, or trees with nice benches under them, for the vandals to graffiti over. We can single or double traffic lanes all we want, but at the end of the day every one of the above that is expanded is directly and oppositely to the detriment of the others. And no matter what the Greens say - and to be fair, much of their mutterings ger more criticism than is fair - people will never, ever give up their own personal private transport now that after a century we've got used to it, no matter what the price of petrol, and be they powered by battery, petrol, diesel, gas, paraffin, steam or guava juice. So private vehicles will retain at least some sort of presence in the city for ever. And the population continues to increase which means more of them. The only show in town in the long run - yes, I know our politicians don't understand what "long" means - is a fully comprehensive underground railway system. Better now when the government has the money than at a future date when we mightn't. We had the world's first commuter railway. No reason why we can't get an underghround railway to match! It needs to connect Swords and Dunboyne north, Maynooth and some of those new places on the Cork line to the east, and Bray / Tallaght / Knocklyon south.

In steam days, trains with 60ft timber carriages could leave from Limerick and go round the direct curve. Both 28s and new BEMUs will have much shorter carriages, so there is actually zero issue in terms of how tight the curve is, I presume?

That makes perfect sense, and is doubtless why I couldn't find BCDR stock on their website!

But if you google "Bill Bedford", Wizard comes up too - in fact, before Mousa..........

Just seen that - so he is both “Mousa” and also “Wizard”……

As an aside, I’ve just looked up his website and don’t see any Irish models. Am I looking in the wrong place?

Superb model

The BCDR model coach….. is it an SSM model?

I’ll consult with Barry Carse; I suspect the latter is the case.

I would agree. It’s the only period where you such a huge variety of stock, plus both steam and diesel. Many, many one-off local operations like the two horse tramways (Fintona and Shannonvale); brand new modern diesel railcars, coaches, tin vans and wagons, operating not just alongside; but intermingled WITH, stock which in a large number of cases was pre-1900, even in a few cases pre-1880. Some locos and rolling stock long predated the actual lines they were running on, while others were so new their classmates were still being built in Inchicore. And with so many branch lines still open - even on the basis of a thrice-weekly goods and little else - you’ve a modelling prototype for anything. And several narrow gauge lines are still operating. Donegal and West Clare railcars were able to glimpse new shiny tin vans and new “H” vans across the tracks at Strabane and Ennis.

I have to confess it was me that got them the bottles. You know - THOSE bottles. They’ve drained the lot of’em…..

And there was me thinking it was an outing of the Tullywellan, Ballyroney & Ballygowan Pigeon Worriers Club!

Original - so, yes, the mix is available in model form. I see a few of Leslie's Provincial "H" vans in tere too, in this case probably to carry beet pulp. There's another brake van in the middle, so gawwd knows what's going on - was my first thought. But: The then Wexford - Waterford goods had a guard's van at each end to save switching one from one end of the train to the other when it reversed at Rosslare strand. And the ferts have just ended up being added on somewhere.

Wonder when those first appeared and finally disappeared? There must have been quite a few as there was a time they seemed to be everywhere….

It is. They all were. The RPSI has a beautifully and expertly preserved van if this type at Whitehead, but as so often, livery details are wrong. It has this cream-painted inner balcony; this should be grey. It’s right inside the van - out of sight - that was cream, at least on the upper half. Worse, all of its vertical steel framing is painted black, none of them ever having tin like that - it looks like a zebra! Not just CIE, but the GNR too, painted them all grey.

The cream interior is an RPSI invention!

Superb! The beet season is obviously in full swing!

Someone told me once that they thought only one was repainted by CIE, but I have no way of verifying that. What we do know, however, is that very few of them survived long with CIE, as they were churning out brand new 20T vans like nobody's business. many without doubt went to the scrappers still with "G N" on them. I never saw one in use other than with the UTA / NIR, but I would say the one mentioned above in 1966 has got to have been about the last of them on CIE. You've got me thinking about the one that ended up on the Dugort Harbour branch! Next time I see Leslie, I'll see what coins I have..........!

From Capecastle to Brookhall Mill to Clogherhead, these layouts are a master class in mini / shunting layouts and show what’s possible ina small space.

Yes. Like much of CIE tradition, and the GSR before, wagon makers / numberplates followed old GSWR Inchicore tradition. So, in the later days of the GSWR, they changed from oval plates to the “D” shaped ones, with “G S W R” on them. The GSR simply copied this, using “G S R”, of course. In 1945 CIE did the same. CIE plates can still be seen everywhere. I wonder will we ever see the same type of plates with “I E” on them? There are examples of these standard Inchicore plates with “N I R” on them, on PW bogies that were either built or modified in Inchicore.