On Sun, 7 Feb 2010 23:49:31 -0000, "Sean Neill" <[email protected]> wrote:
>No sign of life at all when I walked down it to the windmill at the sea end >with a German colleague about 6 years ago when we had a project meeting in >Tralee. It's closely paralleled by the stub of the Tralee to Dingle Railway >which was so notably described in Rolt's 'Green and Silver' but that wasn't >doing anything when we were there either. The railway has been having problems recently. It was criticised for the inauthenticity of its carriages, although I don't imagine that bothered many of the tourists. But it had difficulty in getting its (genuine) engine overhauled and was unable to run. Now that the West Clare Railway has got its (equally genuine) engine back, it has been able to lend a diesel railcar to the T&D. http://irishwaterwayshistory.com/about/miscellaneous-articles/the-west-clare-railway-at-moyasta/ http://www.tdlr.org.uk/revival.htm http://blog.tralee.org/2009/08/01/the-railway-is-back-on-track/ The Tralee area attracted a huge amount of public money for various heritagey projects: - the building of a replica wooden barque from scratch, at enormous expense: http://www.jeaniejohnston.ie/. It is now in the hands of the (equally extravagant) Dublin Docklands Development Authority, which has been losing lots of money and doesn't know what to do with the vessel - the restoration of the Blennerville windmill, which did manage to stay open, I think http://www.blennervilleattractions.ie/ - the railway - the canal. I'm not entirely convinced that pouring bucketfuls of central government money into underused local projects like three of those is really justifiable. bjg
