23-24 May 2009 - A Weekend In Donegal

Well, after I had given my County Donegal Railways inspired 009 railcars and Irish cattle train a run through Ted Polet's Rae Bridge at the 009 Society AGM and Charlie Insley had described it as "A Hibernian moment", there was nothing for it really but to load the camera into the car and head off across the Irish Sea in order to attend the model railway exhibition that the Donegal Railway Heritage Centre manager, Ann Temple, and her staff had been working very hard to organise in order to publicise the ongoing project that the CDRRL has to recreate a little bit of the County Donegal Railways by building a tourist railway through the Barnesmore Gap, a few miles out of Donegal on the old line to Stranorlar.

I managed to dovetail a couple of visits to the exhibition in over the weekend with a pre-arranged "grand road trip to Ireland" with my son, and because of the very tight schedule, my presence with camera in front of the layouts was always going to be rather rushed, but despite that I managed to capture a goodly number of geranium red and cream flavoured images, which I am pleased to share with those interested in such things here....

The only disappointments were 2 "no-shows" of booked narrow gauge layouts that let down both the travelling visitors (such as myself) and Ann Temple and her team. One layout owner pulled out at a late stage after publicity had already been placed in the modelling press, whilst a club owned layout of Fivemiletown on the Clogher Valley, which I was particularly looking forward to seeing, turned out on the day to be an 00 gauge "tail chaser" layout complete with Thomas the Tank! When tasked about this, the club spokesperson simply stated that "they had brought Fivemiletown to the Donegal exhibition last year and thought they would bring one of their other layouts this time to make a change". Wrong answer guys and both the organiser and visitors who had paid a lot of money to attend (eg me) were not very happy bunnies at all.

However, those layout owners that did make the effort to attend more than compensated for that let-down. For me, the highlight of the trip was an opportunity to see some of the 5mm scale models made by George Hanan in the 1950's and 60's which are on permanent display in the Heritage Centre. Photographing these models was certainly a bit of a challenge, but I think  that I managed to capture a good representation in this collection. See Railway Modeller July 1959 and March 1963 to learn about George Hanan's County Donegal Railway models!

Click Here to see the Photo Album for this Report