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Castle Kerry

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Interesting indeed. West it may be, but look at the timber & other freight in Ballina! In the 1980s Guinness, cement and fertiliser traffic could have been in your scenario too. Stretch a point for beet too, and dolomogypsumite being exported a la Foynes. 

The Mk 3 could be a local service to Galway or Westport or somewhere, from your fictitious location.

All very possible!

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Yes, the freight flows you've mentioned will feature - I have tried to incorporate some of the atmosphere of Ballina, Sligo Quay, Kilkenny and others.  

I like the idea of the shuttle heading for Galway or Westport - I should look at doing a route map and working out where trains go and come from.

I've got some bubbles and 42' flats on order, a pair of 22' container flats coming soon and a small ore hopper wagon arrived today from Shapeways for dolomiyte traffic.

I've been selling off all my USA and UK stuff to restart with CIE, and DCC Sound.  

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2 hours ago, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

Yes, the freight flows you've mentioned will feature - I have tried to incorporate some of the atmosphere of Ballina, Sligo Quay, Kilkenny and others.  

I like the idea of the shuttle heading for Galway or Westport - I should look at doing a route map and working out where trains go and come from.

 

Did you see the timetables I posted earlier this evening from 1980 and 1986 under "General Chat"? They might be of use to you.

No reason why the Ballina branch at some stage then wouldn't have been a 121 with a PP Mk 3 - the Limerick Junction branch set was..... Such a set, I like to think, could have kept the Waterford & Tramore going, had it survived, until the 2600 / 2700 railcar era...

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Here's another idea.

There was at one time a proposal to build a branch from Ballina to Crossmolina. Nothing came of it, obviously, but say it did?

You've a 1990s Ballina which hosts multiple goods trains (sorry, "liners"), and three separate varieties of passenger train. There's a one-a-day Castle Kerry to Dublin through service. Cue a Mk 2 set with an 071 or 201. Then there's the connection into the Westport trains consisting of a 141 plus two Cravens and a van, based in Castle Kerry. Finally, the 121 + Mk3 Push-Pull set based in Castle Kerry for the (equivalent of) Crossmolina branch....

Goods might be fertiliser (when IRM's wagons are ready), cement, containers and Guinness....  Loads of scope there while maintaining credibility.

 

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That sounds like a good plan, I would definitely like an authentic schematic to enable me to run trains that feel like they have a destination and a purpose.  I am eagerly awaiting the 42' flats from IRM, as they will form the majority of the freight stock in Castle Kerry Quay.

In the meantime, an early quit at work yesterday saw me getting on with bodging some wiring looms to gather the droppers to meet the power bus.  I'm trying to make a neater job of the wiring this time round, my previous efforts have looked like a tangled ball of knitting which made fault finding a chore.  

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I also had a couple of purchases from the Shapeway shop and off the Bay of E turn up...

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I just popped the 3D printed ballast on top of one of the 22' skeletons.  I have an old Airfix 'Prestwin' chassis ready to go under the ballast, but I may instead get a 20' skeleton - the open frame is certainly pleasing whereas the 'Prestwin' has a solid deck.

Later this week some more station canopies should arrive, plus the station building and a signal box.

At some point I intend to install semaphore signals - now, if I were to use Ratio kits as a base - which ones would be most appropriate for a CIE layout?  GWR Tubular?  Square post?  LMS?

 

Edited by Dr Gerbil-Fritters
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The 3d printed ballast wagon body is a fair representation of the real thing, save for being too tall. For greater accuracy you need to take a horizontal section out of the body, at a guess something like 4mm. The same is true of the IFM magnesite wagons. I’ll have to do the same to them sometime in the future.

Stephen

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Joe, do you have a link for SSM?  My search was unsuccessful.

Another early quit yesterday meant that I got all the wiring finished and had a quick test run -   077 did the honours while 088 lounged in the newly extended headshunt.  The Peco code 75 buffers look ok, and they do the job, as I misjudged the braking distance on 077 and crashed into the buffers.  I have the RealDrive system and it really does require you to 'drive' and not just turn the power on and off.

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I need to complete the track around the bend and into the fiddle yard to allow full operations, but that will be a project for another day.  I probably should make a start on some scenery... ID Backscenes mountain for a start...  I did a terrible photoshop mock up to gauge the effect.  This was on an earlier iteration of the trackplan.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've started work on the main station buildings, the signal box and extending the station canopies.  I'm not a fan of scenic stuff, so it's slow and painful going.

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I'm also not a big fan of card models as they lack physical relief, so this bashed Metcalfe kit so will be going over it again with some additional layers to bring out the Quoins and lintels.   There don't seem to be any plastic kits for decent sized stations, nothing between the hokey pokey single storey GWR branchline buildings and the not very nice resin things.  So for now, it's a Metcalfe kit.

I'm wondering, should the station really be called Caisleán Chiarraí on the running in boards?  I'm not even sure that's a true translation of Castle Kerry...

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2 hours ago, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

I'm wondering, should the station really be called Caisleán Chiarraí on the running in boards?  I'm not even sure that's a true translation of Castle Kerry...

It's the English that's the translation! - so you need to back translate. I think it depends on what you want Kerry to mean, then whether the castle is of, in or from Kerry

From Wikipedia

Kerry (Irish: Ciarraí or more anciently Ciarraighe) means the "people of Ciar" which was the name of the pre-Gaelic tribe who lived in part of the present county.

I'm not an Irish speaker but your version looks like it might not be inflected (the ending changed to mean of, in, from, etc) and the word order looks a bit Old Irish to me so I would put a na in the middle to make the relation clear

Caisleán na Chiarraí

'Castle of the people of Ciar'

I'm very open for corrections...

Edited by NIR
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On 5/13/2019 at 11:37 AM, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

I'm wondering, should the station really be called Caisleán Chiarraí on the running in boards....,

Point of order, m’lud: we never had “running in boards” here at all..... we had “station name boards”........ 🙂

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16 minutes ago, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

Would the name be printed in Gaelic font?  Is there such  thing?  The web seems to think so, but which one - if the CIE even used such a thing.

There is a layout thread 'Bantry' that discusses this (page 3)

 

Edited by NIR
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Pre-1925, all names were all n English forms only.

In formation of the GSR, a new standard was introduced, slightly off-white lettering on s black background. These were enamel signs (like the WLWR and MGWR often used), with the Irish version ingaeljc script uppermost, and the English version in Roman script below.

By the time CIE was formed in 1945, these had spread to most - but not all - stations. Many North Kerry stations, for example, retained pre-GSR English-only signs on wooden boards with cast iron letters screwed on. These were painted black, with white letters.

In the mid 1960s CIE introduced new signs  with white backgrounds and black letters - the earlier standard colours reversed. These were plastic, and usually contained within varnished (later painted) wooden frames. While bilingual, Roman characters were used for both English and Irish versions.

A few old GSR enamels STILL exist - the footbridge sign at Carrick-on-Suir, for example.

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1 hour ago, Dr Gerbil-Fritters said:

Would the name be printed in Gaelic font?  Is there such  thing?  The web seems to think so, but which one - if the CIE even used such a thing.

It's a refreshing adventure, modelling something unfamiliar and yet not completely 'foreign'...

 

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And there would be other Gaeilge fonts also.

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  • 1 month later...

Castle Kerry has had a bit of a rejig.  I wasn't happy that I had installed the track direct to the baseboard - it began to look increasingly wrong that there was no ballast profile.  Without a ballast shoulder, there could be no cess, and it forms part of the scenery so I had to rip it up anyway to install a trackbed, so why not take the opportunity to address a couple of other concerns.

I wasn't happy with the fictitious track plan, as I wanted to be able to incorporate correct signalling.  So I've rebuilt it to use the trackplan from New Brighton on the Wirral - I know, it's still not an Irish prototype!  At least this way I can install the correct signalling and know that I am not making up the track layout.  It's also suggested a change from branch terminus to more of a suburban feel, so perhaps it's moving closer to Dublin and the coast... that will explain the arrival of the Mk3 push pull set that's on its way any day now.

Anyway, a couple of views of progress so far.  Lots still to do...

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and I've made a start on the staging yard, although some track and trackbed is needed to finish it off. 

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I have some leave coming up, so should get the track finished and operational in the next month or so.  Then some basic scenery and the signals in.

It's always good to have a project on the go.

Edited by Dr Gerbil-Fritters
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