Why was Dublin tram network dismantled?

mikemac

I was in Easons today and reading a great book about trams in Dublin.
I understand that many of the old railways had to close as they were losing money (a bit like the future WRC :eek: )

Why did they close the Dublin tramways? Was it simply because they cost too much?
It seems there was an extensive network and if we'd only kept this infrastructure there would be a lot more options for public transport and I bet the city planners wish they had this tram network today.

Mods, If this should be in the infrastructure forum, please move

Wishbone Ash

I suppose the simple answer was the popularity and affordability of the motorcar in the 1950/60s in the era before traffic congestion.

murphaph

T21 Fan will have a bit to say on this subject that might be informatve.

galwayrush

My figures are only a guess from something i read a long time ago.
Apparently Dublin had about 110 KM of trams running up to the late 40's.
Galway also had a tram line from Eyre SQ to Salthill, horse drawn,
Although the trams probably died a natural death, ie because of the motorcar, the lines were ordered to be dismantled by some goverment minister, (fianna fail , name escapes me but i think his son is in the dail at the moment) because they were a symbol of the British regime from before we had independance.

Wishbone Ash

galwayrush wrote:

the lines were ordered to be dismantled by some goverment minister, (fianna fail , name escapes me but i think his son is in the dail at the moment) because they were a symbol of the British regime from before we had independance.

Urban myth has it that it was Ryan Tubridy's father who worked for CIE and declared that the only people who lived in the Southside were Protestant solicitors and they all had cars.

(PS- I don't believe it myself).

Ham'nd'egger

lol Wishbone, good one!

The trams were discontinued because of the inflexibility that their fixed routes offered when compared to a bus, which was able to go pretty much anywhere it pleased. Trams were slowly beginning to be a headache to the DUTC (Dublin United Tramway Company, who had a massively expanding Dublin City to contend. Faced with the cost of installing tram tracks and power pylons onto new routes along with the cost of new tramcars, generating power for same (There was no ESB back them so DUTC had to ensure it's own electric generation, whereas diesel was dirt cheap.) or buying new buses from many constructors baying for new purchasers for lower prices, far greater flexibility and higher capacity on routes, it was inevitable that the street tram would meet it's demise.

The only thing that delayed the elimination of trams was the Emergency, they delaying the final street tramrun on the "8" to Dalkey on 9th July, 1949. Bus operators could even buy buses as kits, either to build at their own disposal or to rebody them to their own design or specification; a economy that trams could not hope to match (Trams were almost local icons and were very individual for each network!) Leyland used to market it's buses with the slogan "When you bury a tram, mark the spot with a Titan" and in time, this proved to be the case in Dublin.

corktina

old style trams were slow, expensive to build and inflexible especially in the face of one way systems etc. The same fate killed off the trolleybus, although the final coup de gras here was the withdrawing of BICC from making the conducter wire .

Unforunately it is fact that the rubber tyre form of transport is the best we'll ever have in most respects....

Zebra3

micmclo wrote:

I was in Easons today and reading a great book about trams in Dublin.

What was the name of the book?

markf909

Also an unregulated bus market (before 1932) saw private operators competing in a very cut throat environment for passengers.

When the DUTC took control of the dublin buses after 1932, the plan was to extend the tram network but within 4 years of that the DUTC board decided that greater profits could be made by moving to an all bus network.

What I only found out recently was that most of the routes closed in the period 1937-1941. Only the Dalkey (8), Darty (14) and Terenure (15) routes remained
with the 14 and 15 going in 1948.

dmeehan

does anyone have a route map of the old tram routes?

Red Alert

Interesting that some tram companies did in fact have a nixer selling DC electricity to certain businesses generally for use in elevators and hoists. (DC is much easier to control for those purposes than AC, and cheap DC/AC converters hadn't been invented yet.) Funny that in today's open electricity market, they could have had an income like that!

I think the tram conundrum boils down to the fact that Dublin didn't get significant postwar development. Other European cities had a forced redevelopment after the war, which meant many utilities including trams and metros were able to be drawn on a clean sheet. Ireland's tram network was probably at that stage unexpandable, the trams were getting old and the power supply system can't have been in great shape. The bus at least in theory was a cheaper option.

Ireland saw a big improvement particularly under Sean Lemass and Charlie Haughey, but this boom was more in the 1960s and 1970s, by which time the motorcar and bus were firmly in vogue. However I think the mistake made was not to re-introduce the tram at that point. Assuming the rail closures that did take place stood, the Dundrum rail alignment would have been promising as a tramway route then, as Dundrum was a bit outside the city. By now with everything settled down, O'Connell street and college green I believe wouldn't be such a big problem for dublin traffic if the trams were put there again in the 60s/70s.

The guy who decimated the railways was one Todd Andrews for the record.

Nevyn

http://www.nationaltransportmuseum.org/

The transport museum has the maps of the trams routes and time tables
and even a few of them there that you can board and take a look at.

murphaph

I can't believe the three letters that spell worst public transport in Western Europe haven't cropped up yet.

corktina

Uta?

MarkoP11

CIE was formed in 1945 well after the bulk of the tram lines where closed

jesus_thats_gre

Bah wish my grandfarther was still about for questions like this. He used to the the station master in Fintona when the horse drawn tram was in operation and eventually station mater in Warrenpoint. Worked in Dundalk for part of his 50 odd years in the railways as well. Don't even know why I am posting to be honest

Victor

dmeehan wrote:

does anyone have a route map of the old tram routes?

Johnson's Gazetter has maps of the vast bulk of Irish railways, including tramways - more than 300 in total.

There is a circa 1932 Civic Map that has most routes.

http://www.ucd.ie/library/services_&_facilities/library_collections/maps/civic.html

Victor

Its not often that you see pics from Dún Laoghaire.

http://www.dun-laoghaire.com/im/photos/oldgeorges.jpg

spacetweek

It basically boils down to the fact that people genuinely thought replacing trams with buses was a good idea and the way forward. Indeed, for some time, it was. However, two very fundamental problems existed and began to manifest themselves over the following decades:

(a) The bus was not actually better than the tram. It was subject to the same traffic congestion as the car and some of its advantages turned out to be disadvantages, e.g. the fact that the route was flexible and could be rereouted at will meant that businesses, which would pay premium rates to locate next to fixed infrastructure like a train station or busy tram stop, would not do so for buses which could be rerouted to a different street at will.

The bus worked back then, due to the low level of traffic congestion, but in the absence of large scale reprioritisation of road space in favour of buses, it would get mired in traffic.

(b) Contrary to the philosophy of the time, traffic levels in a city do not reach a saturation point. They rise inexorably and rise even faster if more road space is being provided or expected to be. It was thought after WW2 that, with the construction of motorways and other road widenings, that you could build yourself out of congestion. Since no city on the planet has ever managed to build its way out of car congestion, this clearly is unachievable.


All that said though, I really think that even if the tram network in Dublin had stayed it would have required major reconstruction and rerouting if it was to still be functional in 2007. Maybe it was better to close it down and use buses to plug the gap, at least for a few decades. Then reintroduce them, as Red Alert pointed out.

stipey

Is it because the Taoiseach at the time felt that we were the laughing stock of Europe and couldn't believe that we were still using these "fiddley aul' pencils".

He then insisted on spending insane amounts of money replacing the existing system - even though the current system was working perfectly.



Sorry... that should be trams, not pencils.

antoinolachtnai

As I understand it, the service was just getting crap. The trams weren't comfortable or reliable, they didn't go the right places anymore and they got held up in traffic.

Another question is why the harcourt line was pulled up. It wasn't on-street. This is more of a mystery to me. I'd guess that the plant was just worn out and with the availability of buses there didn't seem to be any point replacing them. Also, Dundrum and Sandyford just weren't densely populated at that time.

Prof_V

antoinolachtnai wrote:

Another question is why the harcourt line was pulled up. It wasn't on-street. This is more of a mystery to me. I'd guess that the plant was just worn out and with the availability of buses there didn't seem to be any point replacing them. Also, Dundrum and Sandyford just weren't densely populated at that time.

From what I remember, it was nominally closed because it was losing money (but it's likely other parts of the network were losing more) and it duplicated the coastal route (which it didn't really). Some people have claimed it was targeted because CIE needed to shut something in Dublin to show the rest of the country it wasn't being discriminated against in the rail closure programme; in fact, the Harcourt Street line was one of the first closures in this programme.

The population thing would certainly have been a factor, as would the poor location of the city terminus. I'm not sure how worn-out the infrastructure was, or to what degree this would have applied to the Harcourt Street route and not the coastal one, but the line did get modern diesel trains in its final years.

Remember too that the coastal route had dramatic cutbacks around the same time - I think all the stations between Pearse and Dún Laoghaire exclusive, except Blackrock and (in peak hours only) Lansdowne Road, were shut for a while. Even in 1970, the first McKinsey report looked into closing down the entire suburban service (and a certain still-prominent economist attacked it for not favouring closure...).

Zebra3

I heard the Harcourt line was basically pulled as it served middle class (ie car owning people) areas.

Ham'nd'egger

The Harcourt Street line receipts were only covering a third of the basic wages of the staff on the line when it closed. When the aforementioned rank closures of stations in South Dublin was taken into account, it was a case of two termini serving Bray and the isolated one was the one that lost. The areas that it served were not as prosperous as they are today so it was a sitting duck at the time, even after diesel and electric signalling was introduced (The line was well kept due to a few incidents on it over the years and the dedication of good ganger teams on the line). Many trains on it ran empty during the daytimes and at one stage, Sunday services were entirely cut such was the low useage; on the day after it closed, a few double deck buses on the 86 were more than capable of handling the passengers in lieu.

Propellerhead

According to the CIE timetables in the IRRS library the 86 was scheduled to take a hour to Bray in 1959, compared to twenty five minutes on the train.

Mass switch to the car accelerated.

dermo88

There are a lot of misconceptions from the rail enthusiast fraternity and rail transport advocates that unfairly villify Dr CS (Todd) Andrews for taking on the job of changing CIE and making it a success. He came very close to succeeding, and gave it a commercial focus. He also was smart enough to give the workforce real incentives to succeed. After all, why pay 100 men 200 euro a week and have them militant and miserable, when you can pay 50 men 300 euro a week, and have them fighting for success. In the area of Human resources, and more, he was far ahead of his time.

In its final years of operation, with an hourly service, the Harcourt Street line carried 1,000 users PER WEEK. The coastal route was more heavily used. In the Dublin of the time, Harcourt Street was a remote terminus. It also needed complete reconstruction. The congestion we saw in Dublin city centre later on was not considered. Parking meters was introduced in Dublin city centre in 1963, a one way system in 1967, and it was only by the early 1970's that congestion was becoming a problem in the areas that the line served. By 1975 the closure was regarded as being a mistake.

Virtually all the other closures in the Republic of Ireland that occured under his tenure at CIE were justified, even by the standards of today. Slow services, poor services, infrequent, overpriced and overstaffed are a few choice words that come to mind.

What was saved got modernised. The first country in Europe to eliminate steam. Proper mainline services that were nothing less than revolutionary by the standards of the time, for the size of the country. Efficient modern railfreight. They are a few things that come to mind.

The still prominent economist is Dr Sean Barrett. Now, if I said that he used DART from Malahide.......

But back to point, I cannot emphasise enough how absolutely, utterly rotten CIE and Rail transport was in Ireland when Dr Sean Barrett went on his anti rail rant.

Over the decades, both Dr Beeching and Dr Andrews in the UK got a bad press. It is easily forgottem that the same events that happened in England and Ireland happened throughout Europe. They also happened in almost every other nation on earth. The combination of road competition, outdated concepts, overmanning, inflexibility all played their part. If it did not happen in the 1950's and 1960's, it happened later. I'll name countries that are going through that process.

Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania all went through mass closures in the aftermath of communism, the freedom to own cars, the freedom to spend money as one wishes.

Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States went through it fom the 1950's-1990's. They are now in a position where the viable rail lines that carry people survive. NOT rail for rails sake.

Latin America. Poor countries and third world countries find it hardest of all to retain and upgrade railways.

Its easy to forget that much of the network that closed was a backward third world network serving a falling population. What survived was third world until very recently. You need only look at a 121 on a suburban train to realise that fact.

Prof_V

I'd tend to agree with dermo88. Far be it from me to side with the conspiracy theorists (and I'd also point out that the cutbacks weren't Andrews's idea and seemed to have cross-party support at the time, though people tend to see them as something FF inflicted on an unwilling country): I don't think it was that illogical to close the line in 1959, and the cuts to the coast line (which also had longer-distance and freight trains to help support it) show how marginal the whole suburban service was at the time. Cities elsewhere closed similar lines around the same time, though the Harcourt Street closure is often spoken of in "only in Ireland" terms. The overall programme was certainly very sound, though I wouldn't exactly have picked out Harcourt Street as the first line to close. Note also that a couple of lines earmarked for closure at the time are still open, notably Ballybrophy-Limerick.

OTOH the Great Northern suburban services were almost unscathed in the 1950s-1960s cutbacks, at least in terms of station closures (they lost the original Clontarf station but gained Harmonstown and Kilbarrack; the Howth branch was suggested for closure a couple of times, though never very seriously) and I wonder what the explanation for that is. They weren't part of CIE when the closure plan (Beddy Report, 1958) was drawn up, but became so soon afterwards. Maybe the GN's reputed higher standards discouraged passengers from deserting the train, or the presumably somewhat lower car ownership (though, aside from Kilbarrack, which wasn't built when CIE took over the services, the areas they ran through were primarily middle-class) in the catchment had an effect.

dermo88

The cutbacks that took place on the rail network from the 1920's to the 1980's were expected, but the people in charge buried their heads in the sand. They wanted the trains, but did not want to pay for them. The network that survives today was profitable until 1963. It was known as early as 1938 that 40% of the network HAD to close, due to underuse, overmanning, renewal backlogs, outdated equipment. All this needed to be replaced, and with scarce depression and emergency money, coal shortages, things got worse. So a brush swept away the old rubbish

However a lot could not be done until road improvements took place. Political factors played an even bigger role. Town councils wanted their rail links for the sake of the rail links themselves. It did not matter at all that there were less than 3 passenger trains a day, or less than 1 train a month, and were no use to customers, it took a strong mind to tell them that their time was up.

A prime example being Bandon Town councils trip to Heuston to meet Dr Andrews:

"Can I make arrangements for first class travel, gratis, on the return journey"
"Oh no.....we drove"
"Sorry lads, thats why we are closing it"

It did'nt help Todds reputation that he was a jackeen either. And a very smart one at that!

Thats down in the Republic of Ireland. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, and the border regions

Partition played a major role. This is why we see a whole swathe of the Northwest devoid of rail transport, particularly in Northern Ireland. Conspiracy theorists like to mention (1) sectarianism (2) corruption, but fail to look at the true factors.

1. Delays. Customs officers on both sides messed around.
2. Aging stock. Average age of coaching stock at the time of the mass closures on the GNR being 45 years old.
3. Use of expensive traction. GNR was predominantly steam until the end.
4. Political wranging. The Republic was willing to fork out the cash to invest and upgrade what remained. The Northern Government refused, preferring a free market laissez faire approach to matters of this nature.

Which brings us to today. The Co Down lines of Northern Ireland could have been retained and developed. The Portadown to Derry line should never have been closed, but it was in a dire condition when it closed in 1965. I wrote before on this subject on IRN. The conclusion is, that we are fortunate to retain what we have today in Ireland, and it was a close run thing. The Knockcroghery derailment saved the networks neck.

Victor

dermo88 wrote:

A prime example being Bandon Town councils trip to Heuston to meet Dr Andrews:

"Can I make arrangements for first class travel, gratis, on the return journey"
"Oh no.....we drove"
"Sorry lads, thats why we are closing it"

It is also said that, because they would have needed to make a connection in Cork (different stations?) that they wouldn't have made the meeting in time.

Of course, they could have driven to Cork and then got the train or travelled the night before.

dermo88

True, but that too was an indication of its problem. As a semi isolated system, it cost more to operate. The same was the case with Waterford to Tramore.

Even then, West Cork was between 6 and 7 hours drive away from Dublin

yabadabado

"The Knockcroghery derailment saved the networks neck."
dermo88-
cud u give any more info on this point.remember it happening but hoe did this affect the network

dermo88

It lead to a safety assessment, audit, and a decision was made to retain the network after the Knockcroghery derailment. The condition of the infrastructure was regarded as unacceptable. Therefore, it had to be completely renewed and replaced.

JupiterKid

On the subject of the old Dublin tram lines, can anyone tell me if the old style street lamp standards you see on some roads - like the Conyngham and Chapelizod Roads - were these parts of the tram electric line pylons?

Victor

I don't know. A lot of the current lamp posts around the city are imitation, not originals. I imagine they might have the suspension bracket still if they are originals.

lord lucan

As far as i'm aware the "poles" down conygham rd and the chapelizod road are the last remnants of the old tramway systems pylons that carried the o.h.l.e.,i've no link but only the infinite wisdom of my father and he's rarely wrong;)