Bord na Mona, September 2014.
I’ve received great interest in my various previous posts on Ireland’s Bord na Mona narrow gauge turf railways. [See: Irish Narrow Gauge: Bord na Mona Approaching Sunset, Bord na Mona, Lanesborough, August 10, 2013, Irish Bog Railways—Part 4, August, 2013.]
In summary: After a decade of my relative neglect, in the last two years I’ve made a dozen or so excursions to explore and photograph Ireland’s Bord na Mona railways.
These consists of several rather extensive three-foot gauge networks largely focused on the delivery of milled peat to electrical generating stations in Ireland’s midlands counties.
The largest and busiest network is that focused on the Shannonbridge power plant along the River Shannon. Although this network demands the most amount of turf and in theory runs the most number of trains, it is one the more difficult systems to photograph.
This is partly a function of the bogs served by the railway, which are largely inaccessible by road. Also, some of the trains cross the Shannon by a bridge, and there is no comparable road bridge, so it makes following these trains very difficult.
However, I’ve found that using good maps and remaining patient pays off. On this September afternoon about a month ago, Denis McCabe, Colm O’Callaghan and I visited several locations on the Shannonbridge system.
Based on previous experiences, we aimed for known good locations. While we only found a few trains moving, the photography was successful. This a sampling of my recent results.
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Vic Neves and Wayne Monger would be proud of you… the Bord na Mona appears to be similar in many respects to the two-foot gauge salt railroad that they liked to chase down around Newark on the lower, more shallow parts of San Francisco Bay.