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.
In August 2003, I exposed this photo of an Irish Rail ballast train at Tipperary that was in the passing loop.
At the time I was working with a Rolleiflex Model T that used 120 size roll film.
I was using Kodak Tri-X (400 ISO) that I processed in Ilfotec HC and toned in Selenium to improve the highlights. I scanned the photo last night using an Epson V600 flatbed scanner.
There is an amazing amount of detail in this photo. I’ve enlarged one small section of it as an example.
At the time Irish Rail class 141 number 169 was one of the last locomotives operating with the old ‘IR’ logo, a herald remarkably similar to the Portuguese Railways logo.
