CIÉ/IÉ Ballast Plough Van No.24852
24852 is one of five ballast plough vans built by CIÉ in 1978, built to replace older vans (such as our own 8452 – yes, the numbers are confusingly similar). Unlike the older wooden types, these vans were fully metal-clad. 24852 and her sisters were used on ballast trains all over the CIÉ/Iarnród Éireann network. […]
CIÉ/IÉ Ballast Hoppers
24122, 24145, and 26633 are three ex-Iarnród Éireann ballast hopper wagons. 24122 and 24145 were built by CIÉ in conjunction with Whessoe Ltd in 1972 as part of a batch of 25 such vehicles. Known to railway staff as ‘the stones’, these ballast trains were an essential part of CIÉ’s (later Iarnród Éireann’s) Permanent Way […]
Thwaites Dumper and Trailer
One of the most useful pieces of kit of the Permanent Way team’s disposal is their road-rail dumper, which they have nicknamed ‘Daisy’. Daisy came to us in 2011, and it’s hard to imagine where we’d be without it! For many years Daisy has performed all sorts of tasks, from ballasting to hauling rails and […]
Komatsu Excavator
Our Komatsu model PW170-5K is the bigger of our two road-rail excavators and came to us in early 2015. It spent the first part of its life under the ownership of FL Gamble & Sons Ltd. of Worthing, and was later purchased by Railway Plant Services (RPS). RPS are a contractor firm for NIR, and […]
Atlas Excavator
The Atlas has been a Permanent Way team stalwart since it arrived at Downpatrick in 2010. Though it may be over 30 years old, it’s still an incredibly useful piece of kit and one that we’d be very lost without! One of two 1304KZW model excavators built for NIR in 1992, the Atlas is just […]
NIR Ballast Regulator 315
The Ballast Regulator was built in 1978 by Deutsche Plasser Bahnbaumaschinen GmbH (a subsidiary of Plasser & Theurer) for Northern Ireland Railways. It shapes and evenly distributes the ballast beneath and around the sleepers, and is typically used in conjunction with a tamping and lining machine. Of the USP3000C design, it is numbered 315. Despite […]
NIR Bruff Recovery Vehicle
Recovery vehicle No. 20, better known as ‘The Bruff’, was built for NIR by the Bruff Manufacturing Co Ltd., as a conversion of a Bedford lorry in 1986. It is equipped for road and rail usage, with two rail axles that can be dropped down beneath the tyres to enable the vehicle to move along […]
CIÉ Guinness Flat 27756
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, CIÉ embarked on a wide-scale replacement project of the ageing, non-standard fleet of goods wagons it had inherited from Great Southern Railways. One of the types of wagon introduced as part of this scheme was the 20ft container flat (or ConFlat for short). 27756 is one of these conflats, which […]
NIR DBSO 8918
8918 was built by British Rail at their Derby Works in June 1974, as a Mk2F brake standard open (BSO) No. M9534. It was transferred to the Scottish region in June 1984, becoming SC9534. It had seating for 32, with a toilet, guard’s compartment, and luggage space. In March 1985 it became one of 14 […]
CIÉ 3223
Coach 3223 was one of hundreds of new steel-clad carriages built at Inchicore during the 1950s to replace CIÉ’s existing fleet, the average age of which was over 40 years old. It was a composite ‘side-corridor’ carriage that sat both first and second-class passengers in individual old-fashioned compartments, all of which were connected by a […]