This slender volume consists of a collection of photographs taken by the renowned railway photographer R.C. Riley on a visit to Ireland in 1950. At that time, Irish railways were (mostly) some twenty years behind similar lines in Britain, although in some areas (such as the adoption of diesel railcars), they were ahead. But even new engines being built in the late 1940s and early 1950s were mainly from much older designs. Moreover, railways in the Republic, recently nationalised, were recovering from what was known as "the Emergency", the restriction of fuel imports from the UK due to the war situation.

What this means is that the photographs here are a glimpse into a very particular moment in Irish railway history. There are some very workaday scenes as well as outstanding portraits of locomotives.

This book is a print-on-demand publication from Totem Publishing, the publishing arm of the photographic archive The Transport Treasury. It is reasonably priced and produced to a very high standard of reproduction and binding - but with one exception. It seems that no-one actually cleaned the negatives used in this book before they were scanned. Many pictures display prominent blemishes caused by dust and hairs. Equally, much of the more obvious damage could have been eliminated using Photoshop's image repair tools post-scan. That this was not done is a shame, as it is literally a blemish on what would otherwise be a fine publication. ( )