Western Rail Corridor on Prime time now.

overshoot · 30-01-2012 7:16pm

bk wrote: »

With about 170 million a year subsidy, plus the mystery as why no direct, non stop Cork to Dublin bus service has yet to be licensed.

When such a service is eventually launch, even the Cork to Dublin line will end up in serious trouble. It already lost a lot of passengers to cars on the motorway.

sorry that was meant to sound sarcastic (choice of simile face didnt help)...he was saying something about throwing bad money away in all parts of the country to make it fair as if it didnt happen else where (unless he want one in donegal maybe?)... not saying the wcr isnt a bit more rediculous than the rest right now though.
a bus like that to sligo has recently been started by a private company but they are doing an awful job of advertising it

dermo88 · 07-01-2013 5:12pm

Its a year after I incurred a 6 month ban for shooting my mouth off, and seriously, I wonder what was the point in my doing that.

It achieved nothing beyond my getting a ban and proved less.
If I earned money from posting, brilliant, but I am not. I'm merely another nutter eating locusts and honey in a strange wilderness.

Lets face it, why bother. Its 30 years since McKinsey 2 was written and they hired consultants at the Department of Transport to tell us the effing obvious. At that time, CIE was losing 39 Million Pounds a year, or rather 110 Million Deutschmarks, which inflation adjusted on the German beer index is 220 Million Euro to tell us that we were better off gradually running the network down to closure over 25 years.

It was politically impossible to do that.

So you have a rail network.
What do you do with it?

It is 45 years since Charlie Haughey pulled off a political masterstroke by giving pensioners the free travel pass. Today, that is now unsustainable due to the demographics involved and the cost.

Withdraw that, you are an evil right wing Thatcherite.
Retain it......its unsustainable.

Yet it is clear the railways would never have survived without the free travel pass. But they need elderly folk with subsidised rather than pure free travel. They have to pay something, rather than nothing, and pay something directly.

Because having working folks paying E2,80 cash into the city centre, one of the highest transit costs in the world from Tallaght is crazy, and non working folks paying nothing, pensioner or not is crazier. I have no objections to a discount, but crucifying the young and middle aged worker for the young and elderly is a strange form of insanity. And the Department of Social Welfare underpays by a 300% factor for the free travel pass scheme. Its actually enough to get CIE out of jail by a massive amount. Only in Ireland.

Liam St John Devlin, CIE Chairman in 1974 said

"In Britain, the passenger pays, In Europe the state pays, in Ireland, noone pays"

monument · 07-01-2013 8:16pm

Thread locked.

I don't think any of that is related to the WRC and there's already another general WRC thread -- you can post there if you want.

Western Rail Corridor on Prime time now.

Comments