Rent Irish Railways: Peat Railways of Ireland (2007)
0h 55min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
For those interested in Ireland's railways, the end of an era came in January 1961, with the closure of the West Clare Railway, the last 3ft gauge line in the country. However, that was anything but the end of the story as far as the 3ft gauge in Ireland was concerned. Today there are over 1,000 miles of narrow gauge railway still in use, twice as much 3ft gauge track as there was in the 1920's. This network operated by Bord na Mona, the Irsih Peat Board, is probably the biggest industrial railway system in Europe. Used to convey peat harvested in the bogs to power stations and processing plants, long trains of bogie wagons are hauled considerable distances. Locomotives built by Hunslet, Simplex, Ruston and Deutz, Gleismacs built at the old GNR works at Dundalk, and new 3ft gauge locos built in Ireland in the 1990s by Bord na Mona, are all seen in action. In this programme, largely filmed in the glorious summer of 1995 using broadcast quality Betacam cameras, trains are seen out on the bogs, at power stations, crossing specially built viaducts and a swing bridge over the Grand Canal, and in one memorable sequence, where a narrow gauge line passes under the main Dublin to Cork railway, trains on Ireland's two gauges are seen in action at the same time. This, the first modern image DVD in the Irish Railways series, will prove as much of a revelation and a delight as have the previous archive programmes. - Directors:
- Wilf Watters
- Studio:
- Demand DVD
- Genres:
- Special Interest
- Countries:
- Ireland
