Irish Railways - Steve Johnson

I Have been interested in Irish Railways from the late 1960's, something to do with being half Irish and a lot of visiting relations I suspect. Irish railways are odd, they are almost the same as English railways, but not quite. They were indeed British until Irish independence and this shows with similar construction and operating methods.

Dunmore & Fidlin - OO

The layout was basically part of an old test track I had, now where have you heard that one! Anyway, I decided to enhance and add to this test track to form a fiddle yard - station- fiddle yard type layout. The station was to be based on a fictitious line somewhere in north Dublin. This way I could run virtually any locomotive as well as visitors from Northern Ireland in the form of Northern Ireland Railways (NIR). The general arrangement is that the station is in a cutting, with the lines arriving and departing in and out of tunnels from the fiddle yards.

Templeross - 21mm P4

Templeross is my second attempt at an Irish railway prototype and will hopefully correct some of the enforced compromises that I had to make with Dunmore & Fidlin.The main difference is the track. I had previously used 'OO' gauge, but as we all know, this equates to 4ft 1½in gauge in 4mm scale. Not only is this wrong for standard gauge, but very wrong for the Irish standard gauge of 5ft 3in. It should be 21mm! This means that all the track and stock running units have to be hand built to the wider gauge. However, this is not quite as daunting as it first seems, a lot is available if you look around for it. In addition to the broad gauge, I want to include some Bord na Móna running on 3ft gauge (12mm). Again, this narrow gauge track has to be hand built, but some rewheeled TT and HOm gauge mechanisms can be used. The basic format of the layout is a large oval, station at the front, fiddle yard at the back. The narrow gauge runs at one end of the front.