Summer 1998—my first of that season in Ireland. My impressions of the country were cemented during a brief impressionable few months that began in February and ended in August.

During that time, someone said to me ‘In Ireland we don’t do seasons, but the days are longer in summer.’

This August day was memorable. The sun remained out most of the day. Denis McCabe and I followed the Waterford Line, stopping to visit signal cabins along the way. At Bagenalstown, County Carlow (a town officially known in Irish as Muine Bheag) we paused to photograph the ‘afternoon down Waterford.’

This arrived with a fair tatty looking class 201 diesel, number 203. That summer the locomotives were not regularly washed and most of them were looking rather rough. Irish Rail 203 was only four years old at the time and wearing its as-built General Motors livery.

Working with my Nikon F3T with 24mm lens, I exposed several Fujichrome Sensia color slides of this classic diesel from my perch on the up platform.

For many years I’ve been using this photo as my screen saver on the laptop that I use to write all of my Tracking the Light posts. I thought it appropriate that I share the image.

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