Nostalgia takes a journey down the line on the steaming train to Kilkenny

JOAN Byrne and John Archbold, brother and sister from Lucan, Co Dublin, were on platform 5 in Dublin's Heuston Station a good, hour before the special weekend steam train to Kilkenny was due to depart.

"I used to sit on the bridge and watch them all day," said John, reminiscing of steam trains. "The Enterprise going to Cork, the mail train. The engines on them used to be huge. We'd put a penny on the track and when we'd go back later it would be the size of three pennies."

It was, said Joan, "nostalgia" that had her and her brother wanting to ride on a steam train. Nostalgia was a word mentioned by many who turned out to fill the three carriage 10 a.m. steam train to Kilkenny on Saturday.

The trip was organised to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first rail journey of the Great Southern and Western Railway line, when a train steamed from Dublin to Carlow on August 4th, 1846.

Pulling Saturday's train was a 4-4-0 (the figures refer to the sets of wheels) passenger loco. GNRI 171 was built in Manchester in 1913 and substantially rebuilt at the railway works in Dundalk in 1938. It was withdrawn from service in 1965 and now belongs to the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland. It is kept in Whitehead, Co Antrim.

The livery is normally blue but it was painted black for Neil Jordan's Michael Collins film, and is still that colour.

Nostalgia accounted for a lot of the people who turned up on Saturday, and a fascination or obsession with trains accounted for the rest. "If there is steam in your veins then it's hard to get rid of it", said Mr David Houston, operations officer with the Railway Preservation Society. "Some people think we're an odd bunch but all hobbies are considered odd by non participants."

Steam engines are hot, noisy and filthy. The 171 would burn three to four tons of coal between Dublin and Kilkenny, and need 2,000 gallons of water, explained Mr John O'Meara of the preservation society, who has been "at the steam for the last 60 years". "You need to burn a ton of coal just to get her fully ready, to have her properly lit."

Brothers Donal and Kevin Murphy, aged seven and four respectively, and from Ballinteer, stood on the platform staring at the steam engine as it huffed and whistled and steamed and belched vast amounts of filthy black smoke.

"I want to watch this," Kevin answered curtly when asked a question by The Irish Times, not taking his eyes off the steam engine for a second. "Their great grandfather worked on the railway, at Limerick Junction," said the boys mother, Daragh, as if that explained their fixation. "And their father is nuts about trains."

Noel, standing beside her, did not dispute this. Daragh said "we used to play tennis in the Charleville Club and every time a train would come by he'd run to the fence to look at it pass".

The whistle screeched and Noel and Daragh and Donal and Kevin joined the last of the passengers climbing aboard. The engine slid out of the station, hardly seeming to strain at all, plumes of filthy black smoke puffing up into the air, fat flakes of soot falling like burnt snow.