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DART+ (DART Expansion)

murphaph · 2009-07-24 12:23:07

New propoganda here but it really whets the appetite.....who knows if we'll have the nerve to do it though....:confused:

Comments

#12032 30-06-2025 11:33PM

gjim

Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,440 ✭✭✭

Join Date: November 2004

Posts: 1432

I read your comment "Oh absolutely, I'd say Dublin is 'done' for a while after Dart+ and FourNorth when it comes to heavy rail." in what I thought was the obvious way and you seemed to be agreeing fully to @cgcsb's comment, particularly "I think for now DART+ Tunnel is a bit pie in the sky and might seem a bit fur coat and no-knickers in comparison to the current state of the railway generally." Apologies if I misread or misunderstood, but you can probably see why I read your response this way?
Anyway, I disagree strongly with the idea that we should be diverting resources or effort to the likes of Newry-Drogheda, for example, instead of trying to sort out the capacity problem in the centre of Dublin first. There are 90,000 daily DART users, there are roughly 3,000 daily users of trains north of Drogheda.

I'm not sure why there is such resistance to the idea of just copying best practice from similar European cities who have already "done it right" when it comes to urban heavy rail. The conversion of legacy heavy rail alignments to support metro-style services all over Europe has been one of, if not the biggest success stories of the last 4 or 5 decades of the rail. Instead we seem to be aspiring to recreating a version of 1980s London Overground.

Connolly is the biggest knot of the the entire island-wide heavy-rail network and it sorting it out simply has to be the top priority list after DART+. All other heavy rail investment around Dublin (including Navan or FourNorth) is a complete waste when the central core is incapable of accommodating even the existing capacity that the paths into Dublin have the capacity of delivering.

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