The Wild West Railway

No, not that Wild West. But west this railway certainly was, and as wild as any railway in the British Isles. Its locomotives even had cowcatchers and bells and (at least in its early days) big oil headlamps, like those engines you see in Western movies. And, apart from the absence of hostile Injuns, running trains on it in its last years was nearly as much of an adventure as anything the Wild West could have offered. ‘Colourful’ might be the word.

The Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry is the most west-reaching of the fingers of land that stretch out from South-West Ireland into the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, the Blaskets, a group of islands just off its tip, are the westernmost land in Europe. From 1891 until 1953 its spectacularly beautiful (and in those days, wild and remote) landscape was traversed by the Tralee and Dingle Railway, connecting the fishing port of Dingle, on the south coast a few miles inland from the Western tip, to the county town of Tralee in the east of the county.

Even in its heyday (if it ever had a period worthy of that name), operating the Tralee and Dingle was a challenging business. Like most railways in the thinly populated and far from prosperous West of Ireland it was a narrow-gauge line, for narrow-gauge railways are much cheaper to build than full-size ones. And the T and D was built as cheaply as possible. Rather than following its own route planned to ease gradients and curves as much as practicable, for most of its length it simply ran alongside the road from Tralee to Dingle, resulting in some of the severest gradients and sharpest curves of any railway in the British Isles. Getting trains up those gradients was hard enough, but coming down them could be positively dangerous. It was not unknown for the weight of the train to overcome the brakes and for the train to run away out of control, This was liable to result in derailment on one of the many sharp curves, sometimes with spectacular, and on one occasion fatal, results – though in that accident most of the fatalities were pigs.

The dangers didn’t end there. Not only was the line mostly unfenced, and few of the many level crossings gated, but the track often crossed from one side of the road to the other. No precautions, like slowing down, were considered necessary, and road users, whether by foot, motor vehicle, bike, or donkey cart, were left to look out for themselves. Incidents of varying severity were not infrequent, and it was just as well that speeds on the line were modest.

Another common hazard was sheep straying onto the line, The engine crews dealt with them by banging on the cab side with fire irons, letting off jets of steam from the cylinder drain cocks (which makes quite a loud noise), or throwing lumps of coal at them.

The close proximity to the road made the line technically a tramway, and there was a legal requirement that for the safety of road users all tramway locomotives must be fitted with skirts over the wheels and mechanism. All T and D engines were built with skirts, but they impeded access for lubrication – which had to be done before every day’s work – and maintenance. Very soon they got mysteriously ‘lost,’ and the engines ran for the rest of their lives without them.

The single-track line’s thirty-one-mile length was divided into three roughly ten-mile sections by stations with passing loops at Castlegregory Junction and Annascaul, where trains would pause while the single-line tokens were exchanged and the locomotives took on water. In both places there was a pub nearby, and by the time the trains left the crews were often as refreshed as the engines.

If some of the foregoing has left you with the impression that the T and D was run with a certain easy-going casualness you would be right. As early as 1893, only two years after opening, the railway was being investigated by the Board of Trade for dodgy management and operating practices, but it persisted in its cheerfully wayward course for the rest of its existence.

As is so often the case with less than perfect railway practices, the root cause was lack of money. From the day it opened the Tralee and Dingle ran at a loss, and throughout its life it needed subsidies from public money to keep it going. It couldn’t last for ever. Passenger services terminated in 1939, freight followed in 1947, and thereafter the line’s neglected tracks lay rusty and grass-grown, its three remaining locomotives standing cold and dead in their tumbledown shed at Tralee.

But the railway wasn’t quite dead yet. It had entered the most extraordinary and famous – or notorious – phase of its disreputable history.

On the last Saturday of every month there was a cattle fair in Dingle. Over those weekends the Tralee and Dingle woke up for a couple of days, running empty cattle trucks from Tralee to Dingle and bringing them back the next day to Tralee loaded with cattle sold at the fair.

On the Friday evening the three engines were fired up, ‘to see if the water would boil,’ as one of the shed staff put it. He was only half-joking. Two of those locomotives dated from the opening of the line and the third was only a few years younger, but more importantly none had had a proper overhaul for years. There was no certainty that they would actually still work until it had been tried.

There were no longer any coaling facilities at Dingle, so enough coal had to be carried to get there and back. Every place on the locomotives flat enough to hold it was heaped with it. Extra supplies of sand (for dropping on the rails if the wheels should slip) were carried too. All the cattle trucks still fit for use were marshalled into one long train, and on Saturday morning, hauled by two locomotives, it started hopefully off towards Dingle. Setting out on those run-down and neglected veterans along a semi-derelict line that hadn’t seen a train for a month was a venture into the unknown.

If the return journey on Sunday wasn’t quite such a shot in the dark – at least the men knew that the line was passable – it presented its own difficulties. With the trucks heavy with their cargo of cattle, the old engines had to be thrashed mercilessly to get the train up the hills, and there was the ever-present possibility of mechanical breakdown, running out of steam or slipping to a standstill. Oh, and it was not unknown for at least some of the crew members to be challenged by the aftermath of a Saturday night enjoyed in the pubs of Dingle. On one occasion one of the firemen slept off the previous evening’s refreshments for rather too long, and the train left without him. In an episode worthy of a Mack Sennett silent comedy, he recruited one of the locals to take him in his car and chase after it, clambering onto the slowly moving train to derisive greetings from his colleagues.

Probably the most hazardous part of the entire undertaking was crossing the viaduct at Lispole, about four miles from Dingle. Although it was mostly masonry, there were two steel spans in the middle, and those spans had been quietly rusting away since the nineteen-twenties. Accordingly there was a standing instruction that on no account must more than one engine cross the viaduct at a time, and then only at dead slow speed. But one of those steep grades rose near its eastern end, and slowing and stopping the Dingle-bound train’s barely controlled descent so the lead engine could be detached and sent on ahead was a fraught business. The crews didn’t bother, and took their chances.

If that was risky, what happened on the way back was downright reckless. With a heavy train behind them and a steep climb ahead of them, the men were in no mood to stop or even to slow down. On the contrary, they would open everything wide and charge the viaduct at full tilt. They got away with it, but how close those trains were to disaster will never be known.

In those last years word spread among railway enthusiasts about eccentricity and derring-do on the Tralee and Dingle, and numbers of them gravitated to this remote corner of Ireland to photograph and film the cattle trains, and sometimes even to ride on them, while they had the chance. They knew it couldn’t last much longer, and it didn’t. The last cattle train ran in June 1953, and that was the end of the Tralee and Dingle Railway. But I was astonished (and pleased) to find that at least one of those enthusiasts’ films still exists and is on YouTube. In colour even, though hardly hi-res. You can find it here.

Afterword:

I first heard about the Tralee and Dingle Railway from a book I read quite a few years ago, a general survey of the history of British narrow-gauge railways. My interest was rekindled last summer, when we rented a charming old cottage in a scattered community of about half-a-dozen houses rejoicing in the name of Ballinknockane, out in the wilds a few miles north of Dingle town, and near Brandon Creek, where St Brendan is reputed to have set sail. I have to say I loved the place – from the cottage we could see mountains, the Atlantic Ocean, and even a distant view of the Blasket Islands – and I can tell you that everything you may have heard about the beauty of the Dingle Peninsula is true. When the weather allows you to see it, that is: I couldn’t resist a t-shirt bearing the legend DINGLE RAIN FESTIVAL. More to the point, the cottage was full of books, and one of them was a brief photographic history of the railway, which inspired this blog.