Great rail journeys of the world..not
Trip Start
Mar 29, 2006
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84
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Trip End
Feb 28, 2007
Bannagher, Ireland
Thursday, July 20, 2006
We did the bog tour today.
A short distance away near the town of Shannonbridge was this Bog Railway...a conducted tour by train across an Irish bog. I just felt that it was something not to be missed with a name like that.
We were a bit early so had a cup of tea while we waited for the first run of the day. The train itself reminded me of the sugar cane trains up in the north of Queensland. The carriage had bus seats in it and even looked like a bus from the outside except for the train wheels and it was driven by a small diesel engine by a small Irishman along a narrow gauge railway. The rails themselves were not permanently fixed to the ground. Like a model railway set they could be snapped apart, stored elsewhere for a period and laid out whenever or wherever required according to the harvesting needs of the peat bog, for that was what we were traveling over...peat.
All around us as we chugged along was a black expanse of peat. The bog was a wet collector of vegetation laid down in strata over thousands of years. Unlike coal it had not been subjected to the pressures of tons of overhead rock. It had decomposed and settled into layers of combustible carbon like a heavy black clay. Whereas in the old days they had specially designed peat shovels which the locals would use to cut the peat into manageable blocks for domestic use the peat was now dug out by machine, crushed into a crumb size and laid out in long barrows (not wheelbarrows) to be eventually carried away to the power station in the distance to fuel its furnaces. I do not know why it was not used in its solid form. It was interesting if not terribly exciting.
