Europa Bus Centre, Belfast

Richard Logue

I like the Europa Bus Centre in Belfast. Great location and seamless integration between road and rail.

KCAccidental

thanks.

Con Logue

Seamless integration between Road and Rail is something that seems to be impossible in the Republic, apart from the near accidental juxtaposition of Busaras to Connolly and the tram line. Years ago the old printed rail timetable, right to the first Irish Rail one, had a substantial section dealing with bus connections from many railway stations.

However, since the reign of Mary Harney it seems that having the constituent bits of CIÉ working against each other instead of with each other is Official Ireland dogma. Why? Translink, given the often dismal history of railways in Northern Ireland after 1948, is showing the way here.

Richard

It wasn't always that way - Great Victoria Street station had been closed in the seventies (replaced by Central Station which was not particularly central) and it was only in the 90s when it reopened that rail and bus were brought together.

Some services go to the Laganside bus-centre and its a but of a walk to the nearest railway station, Bridge End.

n97 mini

Hmm, I don't think they have it quite right there either.

Victoria is not a proper rail transport hub, it's more of a spur and trains running around to it do so fairly slowly, and lots of trains don't serve it all.

Con Logue

n97 mini wrote: »

Hmm, I don't think they have it quite right there either.

Victoria is not a proper rail transport hub, it's more of a spur and trains running around to it do so fairly slowly, and lots of trains don't serve it all.

Unless the timetables at www.translink.co.uk are a work of fiction, you are mistaken. Only a handful of Larne line trains and the Enterprises don't use GVS. Every other NI Railways train to and from Belfast serves Great Victoria Street.

n97 mini

Con Logue wrote: »

Unless the timetables at www.translink.co.uk are a work of fiction, you are mistaken. Only a handful of Larne line trains and the Enterprises don't use GVS.

No Enterprises at all, several Larne trains, several Bangor trains. That's lots to me.

Con Logue

n97 mini wrote: »

No Enterprises at all, several Larne trains, several Bangor trains. That's lots to me.

OK let's break it down using the Monday to Friday timetable.

Fifty trains a day travel to Bangor. The following trains from Central to Bangor don't run from Great Victoria Street: 0702, 0722, 1542, 1635, 1655, 1715, 1735, 1755, 1815 and 1910. That's ten trains out of fifty that don't run from GVS to Bangor and the Central origin trains are surrounded on either side by trains that do run from Great Victoria Street.

Thirty six trains a day to Portadown excluding the Enterprise. Not one train, other than the Enterprise bypasses Great Victoria Street.

Larne line trains: including the short workings to Carrickfergus and Whitehead as not all run to Larne itself, there are thirty seven trains a day on Monday to Friday from Belfast. All except 0550, 0725, 0805, 0825 and 2325 ex Central run from GVS.

Derry line trains: Including through trains to Portrush (ie not counting the branch ones that run from Coleraine only) nineteen trains a day run Monday to Friday on the Derry line. Only the 1646 and 1746 trains to Coleraine run from Central and not Great Victoria Street.

So, therefore, your assertion that "lots" of trains dont serve GVS- seventeen in total out of roughly one hundred of forty two NIR trains excluding the Enterprise isn't lots, at least not by my reckoning.

Despite the truncated railway network in Northern Ireland, Great Victoria Street still serves all the extant railway stations in Northern Ireland in four out of the six counties. That makes it pretty pivotal, and with the Europa Bus Centre serving the crucial towns of Enniskillen, Armagh, Dungannon, Omagh, Strabane, the huge chunk of County Down denuded of its railways in the early 1950s and Aldergrove Airport makes it the unquestioned hub of public transport in Northern Ireland.

n97 mini

Con Logue wrote: »

seventeen in total out of roughly one hundred of forty two NIR trains excluding the Enterprise isn't lots, at least not by my reckoning.

Include the Enterprise in your figures and we'll look at them again. I can only assume you left them out to skew the figures in support of your argument.

Richard Logue

n97 mini wrote: »

Hmm, I don't think they have it quite right there either.

Victoria is not a proper rail transport hub, it's more of a spur and trains running around to it do so fairly slowly, and lots of trains don't serve it all.

The main bus station for Belfast and all but 25 (including the Enterprise) trains out of 150 trains serve GVS. I think we can agree that the majority of trains on the NIR network serve GVS. As and when the Enterprise switches to GVS as I believe it will at some point, you will be left with 17 trains. Getting the Enterprise into GVS will require some smoothing of the curves into and out of GVS so I suspect the line speeds will increase at that point.;

I'd love to see the Enterprise at GVS, it's a far better location than Central. But the connecting trains to and from Central to GVS are frequent and as I found this weekend, the connections work well.

Con Logue

n97 mini wrote: »

Include the Enterprise in your figures and we'll look at them again. I can only assume you left them out to skew the figures in support of your argument.

Seventeen and eight is twenty five. Still not a "lot" out of one hundred and fifty outbound trains.

n97 mini

One in six, or almost seventeen per cent of train trains do not serve the station. That's lots, and especially when one hundred per cent of all trains to and from the biggest city on the island don't, that adds more weight to the argument that Great Victora Street is a far from perfect transport hub.

Con Logue

Expanding the railway side to cope with the Enterprise solves that perceived problem. One hundred and twenty five trains a day leaving GVS for points other than Dublin is significant enough in its own right and despite Belfast being smaller than Dublin it has its own critical mass, which we often forget down here.

GVS/Europa is still the most important transport hub in Northern Ireland and there isn't anything as integrated or comparable in the Republic, especially when for Harneyite reasons Irish Rail, Bus Eireann, Dublin Bus and Rosslare Europort all act as if the other component parts of the CIÉ empire don't exist.

Richard

n97 mini wrote: »

One in six, or almost seventeen per cent of train trains do not serve the station. That's lots, and especially when one hundred per cent of all trains to and from the biggest city on the island don't, that adds more weight to the argument that Great Victora Street is a far from perfect transport hub.

No it doesn't. One short train ride from Belfast Central for the small number of trains that don't stop at GVS isn't a problem. I think you're clutching at straws here.

n97 mini

I think there's an element of wanting to bash CIE here. While I love bashing CIE as much as the next person, the reality is that while Great Victoria Street might be better than anything CIE have done, it isn't the panacea of public transport some people are making it out to be.

Richard Logue

Well no one is saying it's perfect, but it is good.

Supposing Connolly Station handled most of IE's Dublin traffic and all of Busaras's traffic?

Lapin

For the most integrated transport hub in the country, go to Galway.

The rail and Bus Éireann stations are in the same building.

Galway coach station is a minutes walk away serving GoBus and Citylink.

The main entrance to the train station is as close to the local Bus Éireann, City Direct bus stops and the taxi rank outside in Eyre Square as it is to the front carriages of the trains inside.

And there's a helipad right nextdoor with room for 3 choppers !


/ Thread !

Richard Logue

Lapin wrote: »

For the most integrated transport hub in the country, go to Galway.



/ Thread !

Very nice, how many trains and buses does Galway station handle daily?

n97 mini

Richard Logue wrote: »

Very nice, how many trains and buses does Galway station handle daily?

How many do Connolly and Heuston handle?

Lapin

Richard Logue wrote: »

Very nice, how many trains and buses does Galway station handle daily?

Loads.

ArmaniJeanss

Out of interest can you use your Enterprise ticket to get a different train to GVS (akin to the Connolly/Pease/Tara discussion in the other thread)

Con Logue

ArmaniJeanss wrote: »

Out of interest can you use your Enterprise ticket to get a different train to GVS (akin to the Connolly/Pease/Tara discussion in the other thread)

Yes you can. No bother at all. Did it on Saturday. You can also show your ticket to Dublin at the barrier at GVS and they'll let you through to make a connection back to Central and the Dublin train.

Richard Logue

Lapin wrote: »

Loads.

Ha ha very funny. Actually Ceannt station manages 18 departures per day, a little less than GVS's 100+. But Ceannt's a hub so therefore GVS can be safely considered a hub as well.

/thread

comradestalin

The distance between Connolly Station and the Busaras is small enough that you could charitably refer to them both as part of the same complex. All you have to do is cross Amiens St.

Great Victoria Street's connection to the Larne line was improved in the new timetable which came out earlier this year. Prior to that, almost none of the weekday Larne line services stopped there, and you had to get a connection. The GVS station is very popular and a few politicians told me that one of the biggest complaints they got was that so few Larne services terminated there. Translink, to their credit, listened.

n97 mini

A quick scan through the timetable and Connolly handles about 250 trains a day by my reckoning.

Terrontress

I understand that Coleraine and Bangor have good bus / rail integration but have never been to either, except travelling past Bangor in a car.

Has anyone used them? Are the bus timetables planned with rail arrivals and departures in mind?

I was going to write about the lack of integration between bus and train in Newry but Newry station isn't even integrated with the city, never mind the bus station!

comradestalin

Having the buses and trains in one building (as is the case in Bangor and Coleraine) is one thing; having the timetables integrated is another.

Quite a few of the bus stations around the country are either combined stations, or are former train stations of lines long-since gone. Dungannon springs to mind, the bus station there is on the site of the extended part of Dungannon station. Part of the platform is still in situ nearby. Closer to home, Oxford Street bus station was on the site of the Belfast Central Railway's facility on the quay (it was later replaced by Laganside). The original Great Victoria Street was converted to a bus station, and it is still the main bus terminal.

AngryLips

Connolly is so close to Busaras that if there was an underground walkway between the two nobody would be complaining about the "lack of integration".

Let's face it, converged bus and rail station is the exception not the rule across most of the world.

ArmaniJeanss

Terrontress wrote: »

I was going to write about the lack of integration between bus and train in Newry but Newry station isn't even integrated with the city, never mind the bus station!

Bus meets each Enterprise and brings you free to the centre of town (bus station).
For the reverse journey a bus is timed from the bus station to get to the train station before departure (only applies to up to 5.05pm train admittedly).

Its reasonable enough imo, and is at least a partial solution to the train station being 3 uphill miles outside the town.

ardmacha

I was going to write about the lack of integration between bus and train in Newry but Newry station isn't even integrated with the city, never mind the bus station!

Of course this isn't the real Newry station, which closed in 1965. However, trains did not stop at all at the present station for 20 years, so things have improved.

Terrontress

ArmaniJeanss wrote: »

Bus meets each Enterprise and brings you free to the centre of town (bus station).
For the reverse journey a bus is timed from the bus station to get to the train station before departure (only applies to up to 5.05pm train admittedly).

Its reasonable enough imo, and is at least a partial solution to the train station being 3 uphill miles outside the town.

True, Translink do their best to overcome the issue of location and if picking someone up at the station, the location is ideal instead of going in to town.

Richard Logue

Terrontress wrote: »

True, Translink do their best to overcome the issue of location and if picking someone up at the station, the location is ideal instead of going in to town.

That's a lesson Irish Rail should learn regarding Heuston's relatively remote location from the City Centre, I certainly think the Dublin City Centre stations zone that currently comprises Connolly, Tara St and Pearse should be expanded to include Heuston, and offer free Luas and Dublin Bus transfers with any Dublin rail ticket.

AngryLips

ardmacha wrote: »

Of course this isn't the real Newry station, which closed in 1965. However, trains did not stop at all at the present station for 20 years, so things have improved.

Slightly off topic, but where was the original Newry station and why did they relocate it?