islandbridgejct

I remember the first time I had a couple of Vlaamse tripels before dinner alright. (Well, I don’t exactly remember, but I think I was in a similar state to monsieur Delvaux when he modeled that tandem. The good fathers didn’t mention which charity the proceeds go to, did they? I’m sure the Société d’Anciens Brasseurs de Chimay is a noble cause.

Dhera, would you go away out of that with your soft morning? 'Tis fine. Can you not see the sun is shining in town - and over the sea too, judging by the colour of it, but that's a different matter entirely. And it might clear up later entirely, Michael, so it might. (Just being picky, do you think the sea should be a bit greener under all that cloud?) Alan

As another person who didn't know Gordon personally but enjoyed his thread, my condolences to his family in their loss. Gordon's posts were always good humoured, even in adversity, and he spread a lot of light and happiness. Alan

If you want to hear what Flann O'Brien (or Myles na gCopaleen, or plain old Brian O'Nolan) had to say about railways, start here: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/cruiskeen-lawn-june-24th-july-8th-1942-1.614120 Maybe someone could design a compound 2-8-2 for use on the C&L coal trains, though the authorities in Inchicore might have something to say on the subject: those are the boys that don't forget a slight in a hurry, particularly one published in the Times.

That sounds like a bogie. Could you have a 4-2-2 bus? Maybe you could adapt that nice D class to run on the road?

Was that before they built the first P4 version?

It has just left Kingsbridge and is about to pass Islandbridge Jct. Now where have I heard that name before? In the background is the Kingsbridge (later Heuston) goods yard, now a car park. I like the name 'Heuston': it must be the only major station named after a ticket clerk. That will have been a band of scientific fundamentalists who had read that nature abhors a vacuum.

I'm sorry Don and others. I was just being silly. I started off with a genuine question: why did Sprite have such big wheels and such a small boiler. It must have ended up out of breath, sorry - steam, very quickly, even with such a light train. Then I suggested a silly hypothesis: that it was to outrun train robbers. Then I wondered who the train robbers might be, and reasoned that, as the indigenous population couldn't own horses, it must have been the nobility. (But of course, they already owned the shares in the railway and were coining it.) Besides, by the late 19th century, Ireland was largely fairly peaceful so there wouldn't have been much scope for this sort of thing. When things got hot, between 1919 and 1921, the boys generally just got their friends in the signal box to stop the train (sometimes at gunpoint, so they could argue duress.) There was a train robbery at Sallins, but in the 1970s, not the 1870s, leading to the wrongful conviction of 3 men (who beat confessions out of themselves with no help from the Gardai at all, at all): https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/wronged-man-still-seeking-answers-40-years-after-sallins-train-robbery-1.3673264 There are no good pictures of the train robbery online, so here's a link instead to the 12.30 for Sallins (and probably points beyond) leaving Kingsbridge hauled by No. 321: http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000303617 That's enough silliness from me. Please drag the thread back on topic, and tell me to shut up if I pipe up again. I do wonder about that combination of small boiler and big wheels though, even for such a light load. Alan

That's right. It's a model of number 90, a diminutive 0-6-0 originally built with a 1 1/2 compartment coach attached to it for use on the Castleisland branch in Kerry. I gather it wasn't a great success, and they split the loco and coach (which you can read in the photo if you're short sighted like me.) There was a 2nd one. I think it may have been number 100. Number 90 finished her working life on the Courtmacsherry branch along with Argadeen. Then she stood on a plinth on the platform at Mallow until the 1980s when a preservation society rescued her. After the society folded, she had to be rescued again. I'm not sure where she is now, possibly Downpatrick. The other loco shown is Sprite which I like because of her unfeasibly large wheels and unfeasibly small boiler. Presumably, when she was carrying the pay to the outlying stations, she needed to be able to run faster than a horse for just long enough to outrun a horse, in order to escape from any mounted train robbers she might have encountered west of Sallins. (Before anyone accuses me of Paddywhackery, I'd point out that no Fenian was allowed to own a horse worth more than £5 so the train robbers would have to have been members of the ascendancy.)

I'm being very good and not being drawn by mentions of Mr Bowles et al. You should take a look at "Locomotives of the Great Southern and Western Railway," by Jeremy Clements, Michael McMahon and Alan O'Rourke (mentioned above as editor of New Irish Lines.) It's a treasure trove of old photos and drawings, and information on pre-1925 locos, including Sprite which should be right up your street. It's available directly from the publisher, collon999pub999lishing@g999mail.com or from the usual vendor of all things: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/LOCOMOTIVES-GREAT-SOUTHERN-WESTERN-RAILWAY/dp/1527270289/ref=smi_www_rco2_go_smi_1285150262?_encoding=UTF8&hvadid=500909826360&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1007850&hvnetw=g&hvpone=&hvpos=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvrand=738623316661319436&hvtargid=pla-1323460316075&ie=UTF8&linkCode=df0&psc=1&tag=googshopuk-21 (You can omit the 9s, just trying to avoid them getting spammed.) By way of example (and hopefully too bendy to enable anyone to model them without buying the book), here's Sprite, as well as an early loco-carriage: There's lots more, like 2-4-0s inherited from the Cork and Youghal Railway, and all sorts of 0-4-2 classes I had never heard of. Alan

I'm going to guess that the pile on the left is sleepers and that the item to the right is about the right size for a stores shed. I don't think it's a dunny which, as far as I know, is an Australian bog. Presumably there's already a gentlemen's convenience on the platform, connected to the drains.

Manufactured, I know, but far too good to pass up! As to the grouping issue in 1922, or 1924-5 by the time the Free State was able to look at these things, the reason for not amalgamating the GNR(I) and SLNCR were that they ran on both sides of the Border. The Fishguard and Rosslare Railways and Harbour Company built and owned the section between Waterford and Rosslare, and was jointly owned by the GSWR and GWR. Part of the 1901 deal between the 2 companies was that the GSWR would buy the WLWR. Post 1925, the GSR and GWR owned the shares. Post 1948, it was CIE and BR, but CIE eventually got full ownership, in plenty of time to run it down to closure. The County Donegal was owned by the GNR(I) and NCC, and was cross border to boot, so it couldn't be touched and was run by another joint committee. Meanwhile the DSER only wanted to amalgamate with the GNR(I). So if the GNR couldn't be amalgamated because it was a cross-border line, and an amalgamated company would also have been a cross-border line rather than an Irish company with foreign shareholders, that could have left the Great Southern and Western Commmittee, the Waterford Limerick and Western Committee, and the GNR(I) outside the fold. The only reason for amalgamation was that the companies were giving notice of termination of service, so I imagine something along the French model, where the MGWR would be taken over by the State by 1925. The GNR(I) and DSER would amalgamate voluntarily at the same time, and the other companies might limp on into the 1930s, but the crash and the economic war would lead their owners to do a dirty deal with Mr deValera, leading to state control by 1933, and integration of the remaining lines into the Midland. So by 1933, we've got to where we were in 1945 anyway. Damn, there has to be a better scenario than that! So let's suppose instead that the LMS, GWR and State railway continue until 1948, you could perhaps have Black 5s and J15s meeting Halls and rebuilt 4-4-0s at Limerick Junction; but unless there's a way to get a crimson lake Kerry Bogie or D2, alongside an emerald green Woolwich, I don't see much point. Anyway, a battleship grey J15 with a few 6-wheelers in CIE deep green with eau-de-nile stripes is about as perfect as railways get. Alan

As a cosmopolitan, TCD-educated, Dublin lawyer, former papist, and descendant of benighted papist bog-dwellers, I'm really not sure where I should start.... The Midland always seemed to build big when it was using somebody else's money. The Clifden and Achill branches were built to a standard way above what others would pay. And I gather it only built its Mayo line from Athlone to Westport because other people were going to do it if it didn't, and it was afraid the line might fall into the clutches of the dreaded GSWR. It tried to block the Burma Road from Athenry through Tuam and Claremorris to Sligo, but then thought it could get its hands on it, only to be pipped at the post by the Waterford and Limerick, which got its hands on the entirety of the Limerick to Sligo line, adding "and Western" to its title. Unfortunately for the WLWR, it never did seem to realise that there was a reason nobody wanted to build these lines, and, unable to make any money from them, it promptly fell into the clutches of the GSWR. The Clifden branch closed in the 1930s, but John Ford needed "The Quiet Man" to arrive by train, so Ballyglunin Station on the Athenry to Tuam section of the WLWR provided a suitably rural station to stand in for Maam Cross. John Wayne gets off the train and into the jaunting car for a trip across the Corrib at Cong, near Ashford Castle and on to the area around Maam Cross where the film is set. If you did that journey by car, it would take an hour and a half, so doing it in a jaunting car would be, well, intrepid. Anyway, the film "The Guard," set in Galway, has its harbour scenes filmed in Wicklow Harbour, and Excalibur was filmed in the Wicklow Mountains, so we don't mind too much about these inaccuracies. The map of the MGWR gives a good view of the system, subject to one quibble. From Navan Junction, the Midland turned west to Trim. It was the Northern which, coming in from the east, turned north to Kingscourt. This was about protecting territory: the Midland wanted to complete the original Dublin-Belfast plan to have a line through Navan and Armagh to Belfast; the Northern wanted to build west to Trim and on into Midland territory. Each got a branch that neither wanted, and had to stay out of the other's territory. The Midland tried again in Cavan, but the Northern built south from Clones, giving an end on junction with 2 buffer stops, half way along the platform, facing in opposite directions. It's interesting to compare how the GSWR built its Kenmare and Valentia branches, with tin sheds for stations, compared with the Midland's over-engineered approach. I imagine the Midland felt it had to build big when someone else was paying because it was never going to earn the money to build better infrastructure later. That said, Caherciveen on the Valentia branch did have a long carriage shed, and that must have been to protect the coaches from the weather. An interesting what-if scenario for the WLWR is to wonder what would have happened if the GWR had bought it instead of the GSWR. I gather it was interested, but ultimately did a deal with the GSWR which boosted its traffic to Killarney, which it wanted, without the expense of the Limerick to Sligo line, which it really didn't. If it had bought the WLWR, would we have had a GWR-WCC to rival the MR-NCC? It might have flushed the LNWR out into the open, instead of skulking around with its shareholding in the GSWR. (Thanks for the laugh about my ancestors. I never get too defensive of the former owners of the Irish railway network - who were a bunch of British capitalists and Anglo-Irish aristocrats - or of the subsequent management of CIE - who were a bunch of jumped-up, arriviste, pseudo-cosmopolitan, Dublin university educated, benighted papist former bog dwellers.)

Also available with added Canadianness:

Cattle? Oh yes, there was a large cattle park north of the station - not pens but a whole big field. As far as I've been able to figure it out, the trade was dairying in the south (make butter and ship to Britain, probably along the WLWR but I'm sure the GSWR routed anything it could through Dublin); take the calves and send them west for fattening, so again probably the WLWR up to Claremorris, Sligo, and everywhere in Connacht; sell the fattened cattle at markets around the west, and send them on the MGWR to Dublin, or the SLNCR and GNR(I) to Belfast or Greenore. Export them to Britain 'on the hoof' - LNWR to Holyhead for London and the midlands, boat to Liverpool for Manchester and the north. Or sell them in the cattle market in Dublin and then onto the boat for Britain - Dublin gougers driving them down the North Circular to the docks with the whole place liberally plastered with cow sh*te, and the number 10 tram stuck in the middle of the herd. The Irish Times was agitating about 1905 for completion of the WCIR link to Mullingar, but the MGWR was having none of it. Great times altogether, until the 1930s and the economic war, and then some cute hoor had the idea he could make a few quid by slaughtering the beasts here and shipping the mate across the water in a refrigerated lorry. Thanks again for the kind words. By the time I got to Pearse, departures for the wesht left from Heuston. And some day, I'll make a start. Alan