Here we see a very rare sight, Northern Irish Railways class 201 locomotice number 8208 in the Republic of Ireland on the line from Dublin to Maynooth. We don't normally see any locomotives on this line at all these days, let alone a large NIR loco!
The reason for this rare sighting is that RPSI steam locomotive No.4 had broken down the evening before, so the RPSI has no choice but to use a Diesel loco for their Santa Special. I'm sure there were many sad and disappointed children, but, there were as many childishly excited train spotters up and down the line between Dublin and Maynooth!
This is the second version of this shot I've uploaded. The
first version was a fairly extreme HDR t hat I'm sure a lot of people will hate, but I still like it.
This more natural looking version was generated by first using Aperture's Dodge & Burn plugin to selectively tweak the exposure a little, and then subtly tonemapping the resulting image with Topaz Adjust (adaptive exposure in Topaz lingo).
