During April 2022, on an official tour of Irish Rail’s Inchicore Works, I had the opportunity to make photos of locomotives and equipment.
Having been away from Ireland for several years, one of the things that struck me during my week-long visit was the variety of paint liveries on Irish Rail equipment.
Its really a pretty colorful railway!
I made these images using my Lumix LX7, which was my primary camera during this trip.
The Lumix is compact & lightweight, but versatile and capable of extremely highquality photos despite its small size. It’s Leica lens is extraordinarily sharp.
In May 2001, I stood on the old footbridge at Irish Rail’s Kildare Station and framed an up-road train using the bridge’s lattice iron-work .
Irish Rail locomotive 213 (of the 201 class EMD diesels) led Mark III carriages. At the time this was about as common as one could expect for an Intercity passenger run.
Now, the Intercity MarkIII carriages are long gone, and old 213 is among the 201-class diesels stored at Inchicore.
I made the square image with my Rolleiflex Model T. Kodak 120-size Tri-X film processed in a customized mix of Ilfotec HC developer.
Under normal circumstances, Irish Rail operates its class 201 General Motors diesel locomotives singly.
Such was not the case three years ago, when on 23 September 2018, photographer Jay Monaghan and I had the rare privilage of picturing a pair of 201s together at Dublin’s Heuston Staton on a train that had just arrived uproad from Cork.
Here’s another view from Kent Station in Cork exposed on a visit in 2002 using my Contax G2 rangefinder loaded with Kodak Tri-X.
The repetitive geometry of the station roof and the extreme contrast between light and dark gives this photograph dramatic impact.
I was standing on the platform, just under the station roof at the east-end of the curved train-shed, where I was using the elliptical valance of the roof as a visual frame to bracket the pair of Irish Rail trains.
On March 3, 2015, I made this view of 201-class 8209 in an interim paint scheme leading a down Irish Rail IWT Liner at Stacumni Bridge near Hazel Hatch in suburban Dublin.
I was working with my recently acquired FujiFilm XT1 and getting used to the peculiarities of this excellent image making tool.
