To mark my twenty years photographing Irish Railways, I thought it would be a neat exercise to display images of each of the 201-class General Motors diesels in numerical order. I’ll intersperse these posts with other Tracking the Light features.
Today, I’m beginning with the class leader. This engine famously arrived in Ireland in a Russian-built cargo plane.
That event was before my time in Ireland, but I made hundreds of photos of engine 201 around Ireland before it was withdrawn from traffic and stored at Inchicore.
On 23 May, 2003, Irish Rail 201 leads a Dublin-Galway train at Athenry. Exposed with a Contax G2 with 28mm lens on Fujichrome Sensia.It was on 6 April 2005, that I framed Irish Rail 201 in the bridge arch at Thurles, County Tipperary. Exposed on Fujichrome with a Nikon F3 with 180mm Nikkor lens.Begin in 2005, Irish Rail began applying a variation of its orange and black livery to the 201s that featured largely yellow ends to make the locomotives more visible. Class 201 works a Rugby special at Cherryville Junction in 2006. Exposed on Fujichrome with a Nikon F3 with 180mm lens.
Next in this series, I’ll feature never before published photos of Irish Rail’s very elusive 202.
I exposed this view of Irish Rail 071 class diesel number 079 at Sligo using my Rolleiflex Model T loaded with Fuji Neopan 400.
I processed the film at the Gallery of Photography at Meetinghouse Square in Dublin using Agfa Rodinal Special concentrated liquid developer.
Final processing was accomplished digitally using Lightroom.
The Rollei allowed me to compose using a square field rather than a more common rectangular field. I’ve found that the square changes the way I see, and thus produces different compositions. Someone might ask, ‘couldn’t you just crop it?’. You could, yes, but that’s not my point. ‘So what about the lead-in version? That’s cropped, isn’t it?’ Yes, but not by choice! That’s an effect of the software/internet/webhosts.
Tracking the Light discusses photography everyday.
On self-style tour of the Balkans that began and ended in Vienna, Denis McCabe and I spent a productive afternoon near the Slovenian border station at Jesenice. To the north beyond the formidable wall of the Alps lies Austria.
The mainline south to Ljubljana is electrified at 3,000 volts direct current. The Austrian electrification is high voltage alternating current. A small holding yard at the station was used to change engines and hold freights.
We caught a procession of trains, including a special summer-season passenger train heading to the Bulgarian coast.
The highlight of the visit was this freight the worked with a General Motors diesel off the secondary line that runs southwesterly toward the Italian frontier.
Exposed on Fujichrome with a Contax G2 with 45mm lens.
There’s a stiff grade on this line climbing up to Jesenice and we could hear the freight coming long before it came into sight.
Sunny skies were fading as a storm brewed in the mountains beyond. We boarded a local passenger train for Ljubljana and on arrival witnessed an especially violent electrical storm from the station platforms. I’ll post some of those dramatic photos sometime.
Irish Rail class 181 General Motors diesel number 185 catches the sun at Claremorris, County Mayo in February 1998. Exposed on Fujichrome with a Nikon F3T fitted with 24mm lens, exposure calculated with a handheld Sekonic Studio Deluxe photocell.
This was among my first Irish Railway photographs. I’d hired a car in Limerick and was exploring. At the time I knew very little about Irish Rail, but I was fascinated by the Ballina branch passenger train.
What caught my interest here was the juxtaposition of the General Motors diesel with the Claremorris station sign. It was the name of the town in Irish that fascinated me. I also liked the old Irish Rail logo, which seemed to represent the double junction at Claremorrris.
I’d never have imagined then, that this would just one of the thousands of Irish railway photographs I’d expose over the next 16 years!
