Ireland’s railways have long been a theme in folk stories and music. Just think of The Dubliners’ Paddy on the Railway or the Percy French tune Are You Right There, Michael for starters. One such story from the southeast concerns two rival companies, crew pride, fierce competition and cows.
The 24th edition of the Railway Preservation Society of Ireland’s (RPSI) annual magazine recounted it in detail in 1979. The entry was based on the recollections of retired workers who were still alive back then.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Waterford was a key source of cattle and passenger traffic for both the Great Southern and Western (GSW) and Dublin and South Eastern (DSE) railways.
The GSW closely guarded the region’s valuable bovine workings and were running 30-wagon cattle trains three times a week to Dublin. By 1910, competition between them had grown so fierce that a race was organised to determine which one should exclusively run the services.
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The railway companies provided a locomotive, crew and train of wagons each. They would leave Waterford station at 3pm and follow their respective routes. The first to reach North Wall would win the lucrative – if smelly – traffic.
Both lines were almost the same length and while the DSE route along the east coast is still intact today, much of the GSW line in the southeast and the midlands is long closed.
The GSW picked one of its J15 locos, 1880-built No 184, while the DSE opted for a brand new J8 class engine, No 18. Nick Kavanagh was the GSW driver, with Ned “Cuckoo” Walsh as his fireman. Why he was called Cuckoo is not known. Driver James Wheeler and fireman Bob Wilson crewed 18.
Each train would have weighed in the realm of 300 tons. The only brakes were on the engines and the guard’s vans.
They left Waterford simultaneously, with Kavanagh and 184 taking the 193km GSW route as Wheeler and 18 began the steep climb towards New Ross on the 190km DSE line.
While the article provides exceptional detail on the technical skills of Kavanagh and Cuckoo, for the general reader it would suffice to say this was a crew at their peak. Of skill or madness, the reader may judge.
One of the guards had considered applying his brake but dared not risk the fury of the almost 2m-tall driver at journey’s end
Kavanagh skipped the usual water stop at Ballyhale, Co Kilkenny. Passing through Thomastown at some 70km/h, he had the regulator (throttle) wide open for an upcoming hill that the engine climbed “like a jet” and left it open on the opposite downhill stretch. They arrived in Kilkenny with an almost empty water tank.
Wheeler and Wilson took the slightly shorter route with the more powerful engine, but they had more hills to climb.
They also had to turn 18 at Macmine Junction, Co Wexford, to get it facing the right way for Dublin, a very involved process consisting of uncoupling from the train, pushing the engine on the turntable by hand, recoupling and waiting for the next green signal.
On the line between Abbeyleix and Kildare, 184 “seemed to lift off the rails as she raced along”, Cuckoo recounted to the article’s writer, Jack O’Neill. He was worried an axle box on a wagon might melt, forcing them to stop. Kavanagh simply told him not to look behind them and then he would have nothing to worry about.
Cuckoo was not the only one worried. It later transpired their guard spent most of the journey lying on the floor of his van praying for protection. He had considered applying his brake but dared not risk the fury of the almost 2m-tall driver at journey’s end. Perhaps Kavanagh would have been better suited to his colleague’s nickname.
Parts of their engine were apparently glowing almost white hot when they stopped for water in Kildare town, before the Curragh and the climb towards Sallins were flown over at full regulator.
By the time the DSE crew and 18 arrived, Cuckoo and Kavanagh had already shunted their wagons away into the Dublin yard. The GSW had won.
Kavanagh and Wheeler exchanged words of “an unparliamentary nature” and vowed that if they should ever meet again, only one of them would live.
After both companies became part of the Great Southern Railway in 1926, staff were transferred to different areas, including a certain Tom Kavanagh to Dublin. There, he met a woman named Wheeler.
At the wedding of their children, the drivers relived the story of their race and, assumedly, made peace.
Two photographs later hung on the walls of Tom Kavanagh’s house. Taken on the day of the race, showing both engines at Waterford, one in each frame. Two old rivals, and their story that ended in unexpected matrimony, left to glare at one another indefinitely across a hallway.
As it happens, the race is not 184’s only claim to fame. It later starred in 1979’s The First Great Train Robbery, along with Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland and sister engine No 186. Both are now on display in the RPSI’s Whitehead Railway Museum in Co Antrim.
