Any hope for the West Clare?

[Broithe]

It is also my personal experience, on the Big Island, that organisations using the word 'Trust' in their titles are often less than averagely trustworthy.

[commerlad]

3 minutes ago, Broithe said:

It is also my personal experience, on the Big Island, that organisations using the word 'Trust' in their titles are often less than averagely trustworthy.

Yes we found that out the hard way. Still what we kept (Also not going to say as that would give the game away regarding not naming the person or Trust) isn't bad.

[jhb171achill]

4 hours ago, cheesy_peas said:

 

These one man band operations treat their preserved fiefdom like a giant private or semi private garden railway.

Unfortunately the reaper comes for us all just like the scrapman, when the project goes belly up.

Exactly. I’m aware of one that’s heading straight in that direction. 

2 hours ago, Mayner said:

Several prominent UK heritage railway operations (incl. Festiniog, Dartmouth Steam Railway, Brecon Mountain, Vale of Reidol) and mainline steam operators  are basically private fiefdoms established by an individual or a small group of individuals.  

The Festiniog & Welsh Highland (38.5 miles) is controlled by a charitable trust with the Festiniog Society in a supporting role (fundraising & volunteers), I understand that the Dartmouth (6.7 miles), Brecon (5 miles) and Vale of Reidol (11¾ Miles) operate without a volunteers or a supporting society.

The majority set up a trust or limited company to protect the collection/continue the operation when the owner/s kick the bucket or no longer capable of making a decision.

Indeed. We all remember the BCDR museum “trust”!!!!

Trust or no trust, the major difference between operations like the Festiniog or even its tiny Welsh Highland thing, is that even the smaller ones in Britain carry more people annually than DCDR & RPSI combined!

We just don’t have the same market in this island, nor ever will.

[commerlad]

1 hour ago, jhb171achill said:

Trust or no trust, the major difference between operations like the Festiniog or even its tiny Welsh Highland thing, is that even the smaller ones in Britain carry more people annually than DCDR & RPSI combined!

We just don’t have the same market in this island, nor ever will.

We have been over this topic before

My comment from that thread still applies

Posted June 22, 2025 (edited)

The above posts have gone on about location and population in those areas, But I think some of you miss the point that those locations are holiday destinations or have good transport links.

Wales is only in most cases only 2 or 3 hours drive away from England.

Any thoughts that Ireland is that same 2 or 3 hours drive, A 2 hour ferry crossing plus the 1hr check in beforehand and then guess what. Another couple of hours drive to get to the location.

It's not that those in the UK are not interested in Irish historic railways, It's just the practicalities of getting there easily are not viable.  Especially as most do day trips to locations on the Mainland.

Off the top of my head I can legally get to at least 10 mainland locations within an hours drive from home (according to google maps) for only minimal fuel costs.

Anywhere in Ireland is 3 days 2 nights and a ferry fare.

After checking I got that number to 16

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It is unfortunate that the population density of Ireland and the Republic Of (Other than in the Cities) has never fully recovered from the exodus (Not that it was that great to start with) so there are not that many wanting to visit an attraction in the first place, out of those, how many are enthusiasts? You see where I am going with this. There just is not the viable footfall to really support a venture that needs several thousand Euro to succeed and grow. Even now on the UK mainland places are stating to struggle. The availability and cost of Coal, means more Diesel running (And Trump has done nothing to help in that situaton!) So even visitor numbers are down (Not greatly but people may not go out so often and stay more local than long distance)

I am lucky enough to be able to enjoy my hobbies, those of you that have read my posts may even realise how "lucky" I am. But just about everybody has limits and unfortunately some are more limited than others.

 

[Flying Snail]

To be fair, commerlad, Clare is a major holiday destination with good transport links. From Dublin it's only a few hours on the motorway, and Shannon Airport brings in visitors from across Britain, Europe and North America. From an Irish perspective, it's a little odd seeing all those references to "the mainland" - for many of us, Ireland is the mainland! 

That said, I think your post does highlight what is probably the more fundamental issue: scale. The Republic has around 5.5 million people compared with roughly 68 million in the UK. Even if you include Northern Ireland, the all-island market is still much smaller. That means a much smaller pool of enthusiasts, volunteers and skilled people to keep heritage railways running, and fewer local visitors making repeat trips throughout the season. Heritage railways don't survive on overseas tourists alone; they depend on local support year after year, people like yourself making regular day trips to their local railways.

Tourism certainly helps (Clare attracts huge numbers of visitors) but tourism and heritage railways aren't quite the same thing. A tourist might visit the Cliffs of Moher once, whereas a preserved railway needs a loyal base of repeat visitors, members and volunteers, alongside tourists, to justify the ongoing costs of maintaining locomotives, rolling stock and infrastructure.

Ultimately, I think that's the fundamental challenge. Heritage railways need substantial capital, continuous maintenance and, above all, a large and active community of volunteers and repeat visitors. With a much smaller population to draw on, Ireland simply has a smaller base from which to sustain projects like these over the long term.

Edited 14 hours ago by Flying Snail

[cheesy_peas]

3 hours ago, Broithe said:

It is also my personal experience, on the Big Island, that organisations using the word 'Trust' in their titles are often less than averagely trustworthy.

Like countries with "democratic" in their names are seldom democratic!

[Horsetan]

7 minutes ago, cheesy_peas said:

Like countries with "democratic" in their names are seldom democratic!

Kleptocratic, surely?

[Auto-Train Original]

The island of Great Britain is not the 'mainland' to Ireland. The European continent is the mainland for the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Please stop referring to the 'mainland' when speaking about Ireland in this context. It is patronising and fairly offensive, to be honest. Be like calling the UK 'West France '. 

[derek]

Yes @commerlad please give up on the "mainland" references for Christ's sake. You have your country, we have ours. 

[commerlad]

2 hours ago, Auto-Train Original said:

The island of Great Britain is not the 'mainland' to Ireland. The European continent is the mainland for the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. Please stop referring to the 'mainland' when speaking about Ireland in this context. It is patronising and fairly offensive, to be honest. Be like calling the UK 'West France '. 

 

1 hour ago, derek said:

Yes @commerlad please give up on the "mainland" references for Christ's sake. You have your country, we have ours. 

I have only stated UK Mainland once in this thread (The others were lifted from a thread over a year ago), and that as such was to differentiate from the Islands thereof. Shetlands, Hebrides, Chanel etc as they take longer to get to than Ireland and as such the visitor numbers are really low.  Not helped by the CalMac Ferry situation (Both new Ferries out of action only 3 months after entering service) for the former 2 either.

Yes I am English and as such have been brought up to call it such (I am not trying to upset the "chariot à pommes" by inadvertently using that term).

All this is not helped by the fact that I prefer the (Crown Dependency) Isle of Man anyway.

Edited 10 hours ago by commerlad

[Broithe]

People living on the big island in the Orkneys might be confused by all this.
 

I can't find the Community Map, to see if there is a member there.

[Horsetan]

3 hours ago, Auto-Train Original said:

...Be like calling the UK 'West France '. 

...which is technically what England was after 1066....

[Broithe]

24 minutes ago, Horsetan said:

...which is technically what England was after 1066....

Even if the 'French', or Normans, were really Norsemen, or Scandinavian migrants, who had arrived in fairly small boats...

[jhb171achill]

Good points made above.

The other thing - a huge "elephant in the room" is that compared to Britain, be it Festiniog, Strathspey or Romney; Dart or Severn Valleys, or North York Moors, there is NOTHING like the PERCENTAGE of the general population across the 7 million people on this island who have the slightest interest in anything railway-related.

Comparisons with Britain are therefore always as irrelevant as they are misguided, if the idea is to propose a narrative that what succeeds there has a good chance of succeeding here.

If I had a euro for every enthusiast opinion I had ever heard to the effect that some perceived preservation scheme would have even some chance of transferring from an enthusiast's idea to the cold light of day in terms on manpower, sustainability, skills, and market, I'd be very rich.

I might declare a hand here; when on the RPSI management committee some years ago (1980-82 and 1988-2000) any time an enquiry came the way of the society in terms of available stock for a proposed scheme, or financial advice for such; and later doing consultancy work for a heritage company based in Glasgow, and also a few other things I managed to get involved with, I have been involved with feasibility studies for some 8 or 10 projects, stretching from Co. Carlow to Fermanagh; Co. Down to Wexford; Carlow to Clare. The financial aspect was my main focus - nothing survives without adequate finance on an ongoing basis; this is the primary stepping stone. Sometimes idealists will tell me "it's not all about money"; but it is. Try telling that to a low loader firm who wants to be paid for bringing an old carriage to the site, or the town printing firm who did your brochures. Money first, skilled manpower and market second. If those matters are not secure, anyone wanting to set up any sort of preservation scheme is wasting their time, and (at worst) deluding their audience. My financial background came from 37 years working in a bank, a fair portion of that dealing with business start-up loans, re-structuring of businesses in financial trouble and so on, plus a combined 20-odd years as treasurer of both the RPSI and DCDR, successively, including numerous grant applications. In both cases, their finances were in an absolutely dire situation when I got involved.

In each preservation proposal case I dealt with, well-meaning folks saw what they saw as an opportunity for something to happen. I am in the process of making notes about the various schemes with a view to making this available to do a talk somewhere, but I am not sure if anyone would want to listen; it's dry, dusty stuff which to an enthusiast can often sound overly, and depressingly negative; but cold, hard realities are realities nonetheless.

One involved two businessmen who had been on holiday in England and had seen the crowds on the Severn Valley in high summer. They came back believing that they could set up an operation like that in Co Carlow and make an absolute fortune out of it. After but one long phone call, exit stage left. That was possibly the least feasible; they actually had the cash to set it up, which is unusual, but zero knowledge of operations and an utterly unrealistic idea of potential market. They were not at all, by their own admission, railway enthusiasts. Even their proposed access to their site would not have got planning permission and would have been too small to get locos in anyway.

The most likely to succeed would have been a 1.5 mile long section of the SLNCR at Belcoo, which Selwyn Johnston of Headhunters in Enniskillen had tipped me off about. I think I have described this here before. In the end, what shot that one down was an outright refusal of one landowner (in the middle!) to allow it to cross his land, as a result of a deep local dispute with another of the 4 other landowners............

So; to go back to my initial comment; with 7 million people on this island, we have one 5'3" line at Downpatrick, and even that received local authority funding for years due to an arrangement no longer possible to replicate. 

Britain has ten times that number of people, therefore, if the level of interest in Britain was at the same level as here, they would have 10. 

But, across Britain, there are some SIXTY standard gauge lines, as well as some FORTY narrow gauge railways. That's TEN TIMES the level of interest, per person, per railway, per mile, per locomotive. 

In OPERATIONAL terms, we have some three or four preserved steam engines. Britain has over 300. We have some dozen or so preserved diesels. Britain has OVER 1000.

British heritage railways have annual turnover of some £250 MILLION. That's near enough €300 million. I doubt if that of the RPSI, DCDR, ITG and the smaller narrow gauge operators come to even one million.

So what drives this? Well, that's obvious -  a population ten times ours, with more money, and the most important thin g of all - a CULTURE, based on an industrial past which we do not, did not, and will not have.

This brings me to my final point. That we do not have such a past is hardly surprising, as we were an agricultural economy largely. Harland and Wolff doesn't count, as all the raw materials were imported for that, and the finished products floated away.

We have no oil wells, massive iron ore mines nor huge coalfields. The coalfields in Arigna and the Kilkenny / Kildare border area were coal cabbage patches, not fields, and short-lived at that. Thus, we have no deep-rooted culture pertaining to such things, as they might in Yorkshire, Tyneside, the Clyde Valley or South Wales. This translates to people's leisure interests.

All told, what we have we are lucky to have. Any fledgling scheme now, especially in a remote rural area, has the dice very heavily loaded against it indeed, and as enthusiasts we might consider carefully the issue of supporting an established operation rather than something in a field, near nothing and nobody, and founded more through hope blinded by enthusiasm, than any root in practicality and sustainability.

Lecture concluded 22:59....!!

 

Edited 7 hours ago by jhb171achill

[Galteemore]

Also worth adding that running trains, however full, on a preserved line often doesn’t cover costs. What makes it sustainable are all the incidentals such as cafes, shops and family events. RPSI steam is largely funded by Dublin families taking their kids to see Santa, and buying lots of assorted nick-nacks. Similar story in GB. 

Edited 7 hours ago by Galteemore

[Tractionman]

2 minutes ago, jhb171achill said:

  a population ten times ours, with more money, and the most important thin g of all - a CULTURE, based on an industrial past which we do not, did not, and will not have.

Interesting points, a big difference too is around nostalgia fueled by kids in Britain who were loco spotters in the fifties and sixties and really drove the preservation movement in the seventies, which bore fruit by the nineties and now very much a part of the tourist industry in GB which hopefully will help the lines continue to prosper for decades to come.

Without those pioneers acting on their passion for steam, and reacting to its loss on British Railways in 1968, I'm sure we'd have a fraction of preserved lines in England. The narrow gauge lines in Wales are perhaps a different preservation story to the lines like the Severn Valley and North York Moors. Scotland is not really loaded with preserved railways. Population figures no doubt play an important part in all this, but so does having the luxury of nostalgia. 

[jhb171achill]

2 minutes ago, Tractionman said:

Interesting points, a big difference too is around nostalgia fueled by kids in Britain who were loco spotters in the fifties and sixties and really drove the preservation movement in the seventies, which bore fruit by the nineties and now very much a part of the tourist industry in GB which hopefully will help the lines continue to prosper for decades to come.

Without those pioneers acting on their passion for steam, and reacting to its loss on British Railways in 1968, I'm sure we'd have a fraction of preserved lines in England. The narrow gauge lines in Wales are perhaps a different preservation story to the lines like the Severn Valley and North York Moors. Scotland is not really loaded with preserved railways. Population figures no doubt play an important part in all this, but so does having the luxury of nostalgia. 

Exactly. Different culture. 

5 minutes ago, Galteemore said:

Also worth adding that running trains, however full, on a preserved line often doesn’t cover costs. What makes it sustainable are all the incidentals such as cafes, shops and family events. RPSI steam is largely funded by Dublin families taking their kids to see Santa, and buying lots of assorted nick-nacks. Similar story in GB. 

True. Without the May Tour in pre-Santa days in the 1980s and 90s, and the Santas since, it’s a bald statement of fact to say the RPSI would be long gone. 

[Horsetan]

21 minutes ago, jhb171achill said:

....If I had a euro for every enthusiast opinion I had ever heard to the effect that some perceived preservation scheme would have even some chance of transferring from an enthusiast's idea ...

The triumph of hope is what lay behind a good number of Irish lines, not to mention the many proposed routes that were never built....

[Maitland]

Quote

Sometimes idealists will tell me "it's not all about money"; but it is.

And that's true, but look back at the 50s and 60s and 70s, and Great Britain.. well, mostly, England and Wales. There were a lot of young, energetic, motivated people, with just enough backing, through mum and dad, the University grants, and a fairly lax social security system, to spend serious amounts of time doing stuff they wanted to do. This was the age of canal restorations, Talyllyn, Festiniog (before the f's proliferated), Bluebell, but particularly stuff like the Stratford Ccanal and Stratford Avon "restorations" that used methods impossible today.

When a government realises that you can pay young and hopeless people to gain faith in themselves and marketable skills, at the same time as creating community facilities that create a positive feedback loop that keep that sort of thing going, the heritage thing becomes sort of obvious. Until then we're in the hands of small- shop grocer economics for the plebs, and wow-look-at-that untouchability for the superstars. 

Back in the 70s Ireland was full of idealistic backpackers- I was one- they will have told their kids in English, French, Dutch, German perhaps about wonderful quirky Ireland, that's where to start from to get their grandkids on a train singing "are you right there Michael". I've no solutions, but I think the idea of generating infrastructure by using otherwise unused talent - unemployed kids, hey, what about refugees- is worth thinking about. 

[jhb171achill]

2 minutes ago, Maitland said:

And that's true, but look back at the 50s and 60s and 70s, and Great Britain.. well, mostly, England and Wales. There were a lot of young, energetic, motivated people, with just enough backing, through mum and dad, the University grants, and a fairly lax social security system, to spend serious amounts of time doing stuff they wanted to do. This was the age of canal restorations, Talyllyn, Festiniog (before the f's proliferated), Bluebell, but particularly stuff like the Stratford Ccanal and Stratford Avon "restorations" that used methods impossible today.

When a government realises that you can pay young and hopeless people to gain faith in themselves and marketable skills, at the same time as creating community facilities that create a positive feedback loop that keep that sort of thing going, the heritage thing becomes sort of obvious. Until then we're in the hands of small- shop grocer economics for the plebs, and wow-look-at-that untouchability for the superstars. 

Back in the 70s Ireland was full of idealistic backpackers- I was one- they will have told their kids in English, French, Dutch, German perhaps about wonderful quirky Ireland, that's where to start from to get their grandkids on a train singing "are you right there Michael". I've no solutions, but I think the idea of generating infrastructure by using otherwise unused talent - unemployed kids, hey, what about refugees- is worth thinking about. 

It certainly is, but sound practicalities as mentioned must come into play from the outset for any such thing to succeed...