I made this broadside view of an Irish Rail InterCity Railcar (ICR) crossing the River Barrow at Monasterevin.
To stop the action, I set my FujiFilm XT1 manually as follows: ISO 400, Shutter Speed = 1/1000th second, f-stop = f6.3.
I was working with a fixed focal length 90mm telephoto (a ‘prime’ lens which is not a variable focal length ‘zoom’).
The XT1’s digital format this is roughly equivalent to a 135mm lens on 35mm film.
Remembering Irish Rail’s Athy Cement.
A few weeks ago, Ciarán Cooney asked me about photos I’d made of Irish Rail’s Athy Cement. This used to run weekdays from the cement factory near Limerick to a cement silo off a short branch that crossed the River Barrow in Athy, County Kildare. It was the only train to use this branch.
On several occasions, I’d made the effort to photograph this train, which tended to arrive laden in the very early morning, then depart empty after it had discharged. Most of the times I saw it, it ran with a single Bo-Bo General Motors diesel (class 141 or 181).
I caught it crossing the Barrow at Athy on a fine spring morning, May 3, 2002.
That was more than 11 years ago, but it doesn’t seem so long.I think I last photographed this train about 2005, shortly before it was discontinued. While cement trains worked Irish Rail for a few more years, they are now extinct.
Exposed with a Nikon F3 with 85mm lens on Fujichrome Sensia 100 slide film.
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