The West Clare Railway Railway
Timetable to be operated on Wednesday 10 June 1953 including special trains
The Plan - only outline schedules available for LRTL specials
Select service for display using buttons (default "The Plan")
Les Hyland
On Thursday 11 Sep 2014, long-standing Irish Railway Record Society member Les Hyland, born 1931, spoke to members of the Society in Dublin on the subject of the West Clare Railway. The talk was illustrated by many pictures taken by Les from 1952 to closure of the line in 1961, restored for this talk by IRRS Hon Photographic Archivist Ciarán Cooney. Les had previously given a paper on the West Clare to the Junior Branch of the Society on Saturday 14 December 1957, a presentation still remembered by older members.
Several of Les's pictures from the 2014 talk showed a celebrated special train from 1953, specifically on Wednesday 10 June of that year. A British society, the Light Rail Transport League, which still exists today as the highly successful Light Rail Transport Association, ran a week-long tour of Ireland, during which one of several highlights was to be a non-stop run on the West Clare from Ennis to Kilkee.
Non-stop Ennis-Kilkee
This run was highly successful, completed without any stops whatever, in just under 83 minutes. There is a picture of the steam portion of the return leg of the trip in Patrick Taylor's "The West Clare Railway", Plateway Press 1994. Plate 48 on p.64 shows the steam locomotive shunting at Lahinch in the early evening. The caption is however partly erroneous.
The Weekly Circular
In order to learn more about the working of this unusual train, reference was made to the IRRS's collection of official Weekly Circulars, which includes inter alia details of special trains. To my astonishment, I found that 10 June 1953 was a rather remarkable day on the West Clare. In addition to the LRTL trains, the railway operated three further specials from Ennis to Lahinch in the morning and back in the evening, for the "Ennis Mental Hospital Excursion". These trains each consisted of a railcar and trailer.
Four railcars to cover seven services
A fascinating railway operational conundrum was thus presented. With just four diesel railcars, how did they run a public service requiring three railcars, the LRTL special needing one railcar, and the three Hospital trains? The puzzle was an obvious candidate for presentation as a graphical timetable, where solutions could be developed and tested. But unfortunately the necessary programming skills were lacking in 2015, as was the availablity of any suitable proprietary software to do the job.
Graphical Timetable development
Fast forward to the Summer of 2020, when Covid lockdowns and the resulting free time, allied to new knowledge of Scalar Vector Graphics (SVGs) and access to some excellent reference material, led to a viable graphical-timetable program being feasible. The ability of the latest versions of most well-known browsers to handle SVGs was also hugely helpful. Thus the first tentative versions of a graphical-timetable program took shape in December 2020.
Enter John Price and Geoffrey Wigham
In June 2021, recall of a reference in Walter McGrath's "The Dingle Train", Plateway Press 1996, led me to John Price's "colourful account" of the 1953 LRTL Tour which appeared in the LRTL Journal "Modern Tramway" of August 1953, and a copy of this text was kindly made available by Mike Willsher of the LRTA. John's report contained useful additional details of the West Clare special and advised readers that a log of the trip was available from G. A. Wigham, an IRRS member for many years, but sadly no longer with us. However, Mr Wigham's notebooks for 1953 survive in the IRRS Archive, and copies of the relevant pages were made available by current IRRS member Peter Rigney.
Enter Jim Jarvis via Peter Lemmey
One of the participants on the 1953 trip was the well-known railway engineer and photographer, the late Jim Jarvis, and a conversation with Peter Lemmey of the Continental Railway Circle seeking to locate the whereabouts of Jim Jarvis's Irish pictures led to Peter's recalling that several of the Jarvis Irish pictures had appeared in Norman Johnston's "The Irish Narrow Gauge in Colour", Colourpoint 2003. And that is indeed the case - pictures relating to 10 June 1953 can be found on p.68, upper and lower, showing Lahinch, p.73 upper, showing Kilrush, and p.75 lower, taken at Kilkee. These images, along with those from Les Hyland, clarify the events of that day quite considerably, and help to unlock the "conundrum". There is again however unintentional erroneous material in the captions for the Jarvis pictures, arising from misinterpretation of some of the events shown.
"The Plan"
Nonetheless, the accumulation of the evidence from these various sources allowed "The Plan" shown above to be assembled and visualised. This is built on the graphical timetable shown previously for the regular Wed and Sat service on the West Clare. Scheduled trains are blue (passenger), and black (goods). The LRTL trains are in red, and the Hospital Excursions are green.
The Train Nos are not official and are used for convenience of reference only. The schedules use sectional running times for station to station travel as given in the Weekly Circular, or as specified in the WTT, except for the LRTL Ennis-Kilkee and Kilrush-Lahinch trains, for which start and end times only apply.
Enter the conflicts
"The Plan" will be seen to have a number of conflicts, e.g. the Up Goods requires to be delayed at Corofin to meet the Down LRTL, while the schedule for the LRTL steam Lahinch-Ennis is clearly too close to that of the final "Hospital" special for it to be able to enter the lengthy Ennistimon-Corofin section at the time given in the Weekly Circular. The same applies to the Down steam ECS (empty coaching stock), too close behind the regular passenger service out of Ennis to proceed from Corofin. Adjusted "feasible" schedules have been added for these two latter conflicts. One key element in cracking the operational conundrum is apparent from the graph, namely the use of the Wednesday afternoon Kilkee-Ennis public service to form the first Mental Hospital Special back from Lahinch (apparently in the confident expectation of few, if any, public passengers), while it can also be seen that the second special is to be operated by the return LRTL railcar.
However, there is no point in correcting any further niceties at this stage, because the next diagram, "Operations on the Day", will introduce still further deviations to be taken into account.