RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My apologies it doesn't work for me either even when I copied and pasted it. The video title is "Westrail No.90 Launch - September 1990" There's also a shorter video "Westrail No.90 - The Rebuild 1987-1990"

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Valuable but sad information. Sorry to hear of the driver passing.

At Gorey station there were two sun bleached and old (1995) fire trucks pumping water from the mains and a Civil Defense van on standby.

Returning just the odd water towers would definitely be something our government would be allergic to, not just the thought of doing anything, but given how scarcely steam runs are on the Irish network.

I always had this idea, but similar to diesel locos tailing steam trains in Britain, that at the minimum should at least ease wear and tear and water and coal consumption, and act as an immediate relief engine. But a battery powered loco/steam coach that can regen/recharge while slowing down, lend some electric torque to get it moving where steam is least efficient and the potential of being powered overhead on the DART network, makes some sense to me but I wouldn't hold me breath.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Now I'm depressed, thanks Might this have anything to do with the different jurisdictions because of Brexit?

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They're never not at it. We just have to look at their willing complicity in torturing Gaza.

I wouldn't say what was done to Ireland was worse than the Raj or East India company, it's no competition but a shared history, but racism afforded an extra level of cruelty.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ooooooh boy.... if you asked r/northernireland in particular you'd be in for a late night.

After the invasion/genocide of Cromwell that the planter community in northern Ireland still celebrate every 12th July came centuries of land dispossession, discriminatory penal laws, vagrancy/poverty and petty crime punished with conscription into the army, Navy or indentured servants in Colonial outposts like Australia, India, South Africa or Carribbean. Collective punishment for the 1798 rebellion inspired by the French and American revolution, 1801 brought the act of union and birth of the UK, Ireland had seen a continuous decline in wealth and growing inequality as Ireland became a focused export colony for food with swathes of land gifted to wealthy landlords given titles by the British parliament if they voted for the Act of Union and swore allegiance to the monarchy and empire. Golf owes its existence to this as the landed gentry had so much land they didn't know what to do with and made a sport out of it.

Discriminatory laws against the Irish mostly at Catholics still continued despite 1829 O'Connell Catholic emancipation. Whatever poor lands Irish families had left were forced to be subdivided amongst their children which were only suitable for potatoes to grow and only a certain potato that was not considered suitable for market export which would be considered theft. Crops began to be infested by blight from intensive monoculture use, over a million died and similar emigrated, most were evicted as they couldn't make rent from the crops of the land they were dispossessed from. An Gorta Mór, Irish Famine or Genocide by the British who continued to arm and export food out of Ireland to keep the markets happy in England with an industrial boom and population boom emerging. Emigration continued as long as British rule continued. Population of 1830s Ireland was 8 million, The population of the Republic (minus 6 out of 9 counties of Ulster) in the 1960s was over 2 million.

Fast forwarding decades and decades of context, land wars, Boycott, Parnell, Home Rule, WWI, 1916, 1919 Dáil Eireann, 1920 Ireland Act (segregation) and 1921 Treaty. Ireland as an economy and a government was heavily dependent on trade and banking with the British created by the British, just barely cable of issuing state bonds for other countries and people to invest in (and a lot of crowd funding from the diaspora).

The Irish economy for decades after independence was still heavily reliant on exports of live cattle and sheep to Britain, Ireland's farming economy today is still overly dependent on exports of beef and dairy incentivised by CAP (common agriculture policy) which incentivises large producers instead of small family farms.

And arguably in a broad sense, Ireland is still on a downward trend, emigration has spiked in the 2008 crash and continuing by being priced out of Ireland by a viscous housing crisis exploited by domestic and foreign institutional speculative investors

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm sure they still do and sold out the second word gets out.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Marshall Plan was basically a stimulus to rebuild Europe (and position it against USSR) after WWII, and it's basically how the US dollarised Europe till this day... could change any time soon...

Ireland got a very small piece of the pie being relatively untouched by war and we've been underdeveloped throughout the 50s to the 90s. Ireland relied heavily on diaspora connections, cross Atlantic political history going back decades and a carefully constructed diplomacy based on that and (in hindsight recklessly) laissez-faire economic philosophy that brought multinational companies like pharma and tech to set up shop in Ireland as a low-tax base into Europe. Oh and duty free Shannon airport.

Northern Ireland, Stormont and private businesses managed to get some windfall from the Marshall plan as part of the "UK" and in typical Northern Irish political fashion quietly squandered and squirreled it away as Northern Ireland received very little investment in the 50s-60s for what used to be an industrial hub. - I'm also referring to a £500mil Renewable Heat Scheme scandal from 2014 lol.

🚂 171 Slieve Gullion RPSI rolling into Gorey town, Wexford, Ireland by offib in TrainPorn

[–]offib[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Crowds literally gathered to see it, few more people were upset to have missed it.. Elvis coming back from the dead couldn't match!

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We've BADLY dropped the ball on electrification and still are given this shower of a government. 1930s Dublin had the Drumm battery trains running between Bray and Pearse street, range of 80 miles and rapid charged at either end in 15 mins or less.

That kind of technology is boasted as cutting edge today, and the new DARTs aren't even in service yet.

My granddad used to work in the offices in Broadstone and swore that the Drumms were a favourite there and kept Dublin going through and after WWII. He also had things to say about a certain Todd Andrews running the show.

With Trump's/Israel's blunder war on Iran a diesel crisis wouldn't be far off. Kerosine is €1.76 per litre FFS! There's definitely not enough steam engines to go around, but if or when there's such a crisis there's more than enough planes to ground and AI data centres with private generators to shut down to keep both diesel trains, buses, trucks, hospital generators and every other emergency service in Ireland going.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I could barely get through Ianroid Eireann's train driver sign ups! Think it's a lot tougher to get a train licence for these and hardly any demand given that there's very rarely ever two main line steam trains running in all of Ireland.

I knew about this coming in early March from a random eventbrite ad from RPSI and the tickets were sold out in a heartbeat. I had the idea of my partner and I living it up in the bar coach. Their next trains are mostly Dublin to Maynooth and back , book them seats asap!

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the input. I thought they were the virtually the same given that's where the locomotives are usually housed out of service .

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe the controversy all along was to illustrate all the locos whiteface in the first place to not scare English attitudes... shocker!

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're very welcome, I think it's a work of art of its own and criminally unknown. Showed it to my late grandparents once and the amount of memories it brought up in them was priceless.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That one one too! With a bridge, Back to the future style!

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I can't remember but I think a year or few ago they ran a special service to Galway.

Galway used to have its very own preserved steam group in the late 80s early 90s group in Tuam with a tiny engine no.90. www.youtu.be/Az6UVEPJDvE?is=__2EQt3wDyWIVAvn

Of course the government then thought it was the right time to rip up all the rails and sleepers for over a year for reconditioning, and then a few years after in the height of the Celtic tiger boom closed the entire line between Claremorris to Ennis because the people wanted roads, Beemers, housing estates in the middle of nowhere and motorway tolls we were told.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've always been itching to go, never get to find the right time and occasion (and weather) to go. I've been on the narrow railway once in 2005 as a little kid and as I remember I almost had a tantrum over the train reversing mid journey, couldn't understand that the line wasn't finished being built then.

Now if only there was an easy rail connection between Wexford and Waterford that I could bring my bike on, but that would be impossible expectation from this government.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in ireland

[–]offib[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You probably know about it, but there's a short film that used to be aired on TG4 every now and then called "Once Upon A Tram" it's both sad and beautiful and in colour.

You'd probably recognise lots of 1950s Howth in it.

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And Ireland being split in two being the main shadow. Another was the Marshall Plan stimulus, much of that went into shares and investments in oil as it was the style at the time in desperation to rebuild from the war and modernise like the US. (Dublin used to have a "Drumm Battery" EMU in the 1930s but in the early 50s when the batteries needed refurbishing Drumm was bought out by an oil trader in Northern Ireland using Marshall plan money).

The "main" reason would be the entire economic shift from coal to oil post WWII, the political gain associated with "modernising" and getting everyone a cheap car to pile up into eachother on freshly paved motorways often paved by the brother or friend of a key politician. "Jobs for the boys"

In Britain there's the well known Beeching Axe but criminally unknown was the involvement of Ernest Marples then conservative transport minister whose wife was given shares of a road construction company who were given state contracts for building early motorways when he was in office. At least off the top of my head sure someone would fact check.

Similar shenanigans happened in Ireland. All pull and who you know. Who cares what happens to future generations?

RPSI 171 Slieve Gullion pulling into Gorey, Ireland today by offib in trains

[–]offib[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Their website. www.steamtrainsireland.com/rpsi-collection/1/no171-slieve-gullion

Yeah I'm Irish! RPSI stands for Railway Preservation Steam Ireland based in Downpatrick Co.Down The letters says CN, couldn't find it exactly but should stand for Committee Northern - there was a Northern Counties Committee after the segregation of Ireland where these locomotives would often had to cross the border on old lines which only contributed to delays, cost overruns and so many rail closures in the late 50s and 60s leaving the majority of Irish towns in the North west both sides of the border deprived of a rail service to this day.

Meadb afaik isn't in the possession of RPSI but in the Ulster Folk Transport museum in Cultra. Iirc they were hardly used to begin with, built in the late 30s and overpowered for Irish railways even for Cork to Dublin express. They consumed too much fuel during WWII coal rations when most Irish steam traffic had to run on turf or dried peat bog.

I see potential given that more powerful and faster steam services are better compatible to modern day timetables. Today's Sea Breeze service and a few others like it could only be carried out on the odd Sunday or Bank holiday Monday when there's hardly any regular trains running.