The Tralee Blog

Short notice: Ryanair just announced a new route from Kerry Airport. Starting from 20/12/2008 you can fly directly from Kerry to Grenoble in south-east France. Wikipedia says the town is also known as the “Capital of the Alps”, with twenty ski stations nearby. So what about some winter sports this year? 

As I expected in a posting in march this year there was no steam train to be seen on the last remaining part of the historic Tralee-Dingle light railway, in fact there was no train at all. The problems with the old boiler seem to be more severe than initially thought and apparently the fate of 5-T is now in doubt. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this will not be the end of the line… [»]

Not many people will have noticed that there were construction works going on at Kerry General Hospital in Tralee. And that is fortunate, because if they had noticed it might have been because they were seriously ill. So the new helipad at Kerry General is one of the few structures that will hopefully not have to be used too often in the future. But it’s good to know that injured or seriously ill patients can reach the hospital now very fast again.  

(The landing facility is mainly used by the coastguard, although the picture shows an Agusta Westland AW139 helicopter of the Irish Air Corps.)

As the month of may draws to an end final works are currently being done at phase one of the long awaited River Lee Nature Walk and Cycleway in Tralee. While the paving from Ballyard (right behind the Aqua Dome) to the Fels Point Hotel has already been completed and “unofficially” opened weeks ago (read more here) there had still been a gap to be closed. The final part of approx. 200 metres was particularly diffcult to build, because  the path had to be raised above the flood level of the river Lee there. Now these works are almost finished and I expect the official opening of the complete way soon.

After the successful restoration of the rail tracks between Tralee and Blennerville the Tralee & Dingle Railway had been one of the major attractions of Tralee for years. Unfortunately it has now been out of service since the end of the 2006 season. So I wondered whether we could hope for the steam train to be back on track in 2008.
[»]