Tag Archives: #Limerick Junction

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Just Another Day at the Junction . . .

A dull winter sky prevailed at Limerick Junction, Co. Tipperary on 13 January 2006. Paused at platform 1 was Irish Rail 210 on a Cork-bound set of MarkIII carriages. A sister 201-class sat with a new MarkIV set in the sidings. The Mark IV was the vision of the future.

As far as I was concerned all of this action was a sideshow to what turned out to be Irish Rail’s final sugarbeet campaign. In truth, I was waiting for NIR 112 to run around its train to complete the laden beet run from Wellingtonbridge, Co. Wexford to Mallow, Co. Cork.

The end of the sugarbeet was just weeks away, but that is a slide for another day . . .

Fujichrome exposed using a Nikon F3 with 180mm Nikon lens. My shutter speed was 1/60th of a second. It really was pretty dull.

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Tips and Technique

Beware of Trains

In July 2003, I made this 2/14 inch sqaure black & white photo at Limerick Junction, Co. Tipperary using a Rollei Model-T twin lens reflex.

Working with a relatively slow shutter speed, I allowed the train to blur as it passed the signals at the Dublin-end of the platform.

At that time Limerick Junction was controlled by a mix of tradititional mechanical signals and more modern color lights.

The sign makes the photo.

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photography

Bogie Beet Reversing.

At first glance this view from November 8, 2005, might appear to be an ordinary container train.

It is not.

During its final season carrying sugar beet, Irish Rail took the tops off some 40ft container and fitted them to bogie (8-wheel) flat wagons to haul beet from Wellingtonbridge Co. Wexford to the sugar factory at Mallow, Co. Cork.

These unusual freight haulers were known as ‘bogie beet wagons’, since Irish Rail’s traditional beet wagons were rigid-base four wheelers.

In this photograph at dusk, a laden sugar beet freight reverses into Limerick Junction, having just come up the line from Waterford that crosses the Dublin-Cork main line at grade (to the right of the signal cabin).

The locomotive will cut off and run around the train in order to proceed to Mallow. This was necessary because there was no direct chord at the Junction to facilitate a direct move. The lights at left had been installed to make it easier to reverse the train at night.

I exposed this photo on a tripod using my Contax G2 Rangefinder with 45mm lens using Fujichrome Sensia slide film. I scanned the slide with an Epson V600 flatbed scanner.

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