Kilgarvan mafia, perhaps?

[jhb171achill]

What do you think?   😉🤠🤠🤠

 

[murrayec]

The Sideways Mafia

That's a change for you jhb

Eoin

[leslie10646]

Heavens John, I had to turn my Mac on its side to read this - do you think I don't get enough exercise?

Personally, I used to get my weekly notices from UTA Headquarters by calling in with some cock and bull story or other. When I was about to take a runabout ticket in the sixties, I would always get one and then apply to travel on the empty carriage trains for the week, to maximise my steam mileage.

By far my best coup was to persuade my parents to write to School to get me off for the last week of term before Christmas 1964, then get the UTA to issue me with a Runabout ticket out of season and several ECS Passes to get the most miles during the dying days of the Derry Road. An unrepeatable thousand miles or so of steam - almost every inch with 2-6-4Ts, apart from two short runs with No.207 and a final service run with a S Class - from Newry Edward Street to Newry Dublin Bridge - runs don't get much shorter!

Happy Days! Little did I realise that fifty plus years later I'd STILL be timing tanks and a Glover Compund!

[Broithe]

[jhb171achill]

Superb, Leslie. My biggest regret is I never did the Derry Road or the North Kerry. Could so easily have done both.

[minister_for_hardship]

Were there any sanctions for staff giving out or members of the public having circulars in their possession?

[jhb171achill]

As far as I know, minister, there was no specific sanction related to this. However, railway companies expected absolute obedience to the rules. Today, it's almost impossible to sack someone from the railway due to the agreements battered out over the decades between management and unions, whether anyone thinks that's a good or bad thing. But in the past, if an employee broke the rules, they could arbitrarily be "fined" a whole weeks' pay, be demoted, transferred to a different location*, or sacked with immediate effect.

For giving a confidential circular like a weekly notice to somebody not authorised to see it, you'd expect to have maybe a quarter of your weekly wage deducted....... 

Discipline was considered the first requirement of railway employment. You were told what the rules were, and given a rule book which you had to know absolute chapter and verse of, in relation to your particular job.  Break the rules and you're gone!

 

(*  A porter on the Achill line, who was not passed as a shunter, assisted a train crew in shunting a cattle special. He wasn't supposed to, and being not familiar with the way it was meant to be done, was blamed when a brake van became derailed, causing another member of staff to have a very narrow escape from serious injury. With no more than one or two days notice he was transferred to somewhere in Co Meath on the Kingscourt line!  Appeal....go to your union...forget it!!)

Edited March 9, 2018 by jhb171achill

[WRENNEIRE]

[jhb171achill]

I still have several of these.... a GNR one and a CIE one at least....

[ei6jf]

How would the public know when the trains were running without the circular?