Irish Rail this morning

SandyfordGuy

What on earth was going on? It was the most disorganised chaos I think I have ever seen with absolutely zero information being provided? Were they all too busy celebrating DART at 30 last night?

I know there was a broken down train somewhere on the Maynooth line, but that does not explain the complete chaos in Connolly this morning which seemed to be effecting all services.

The Maynooth train I was on came to Platform 1, a platform I have never came in on before, short terminating at Connolly instead of going onto Pearse, needing several hundred people to go all the way around the whole station and walkways to get to Platforms 5-7.

We then get to the front of Platform 1 where only one part of the opening gates that open out to the walkway were open, leading to about 500 people walking single file through them, then turning right cutting in front of Platforms 2,3,4 and walking all the way down towards the Dart Connector bridge.

We're then confronted with all the screens on platform 4 displaying "WELCOME TO CONNOLLY" without showing any train information, so I checked twitter and Irish Rail, nothing there, ask a staff member, who said "We have no idea what is going on" then I get to the overhead screens near the stairs leading to Platform 6 and 7, still showing no disruption information and trains switching platforms by the second.

In the meantime it was pretty much guess the platform, not helped by a group of 8500 class trains not having any destination displays working on them.

Now I know there was some kind of incident that clearly happened, but the complete failure of any information to be provided was ridiculous. The words brewery and ****-up come to mind.

devnull

It was pretty bad!

The crowd control was awful. around eight there were four darts in platforms and people were struggling to know which one was going out when and where they were going!

cython

What service was that? I got a train in on the Maynooth line as well (think the one that leaves Maynooth at 07:15), and despite being a bit delayed, it got in around 8am on the normal platform 7, and in time for the connecting southbound train to Bray - no particular issues evident in the areas of platforms 5, 6 and 7 while I passed through, including the over-stairs and on platform displays working as normal.

And I'm usually the first to complain about delays, etc. since I'm only on the train this week because of mechanical issues with a bike!

SandyfordGuy

06:57 Maynooth to Pearse.

Normally comes into Platform 6 at Connolly, allowing a connection with the 07:39 Northbound DART on Platform 7, this morning it came into Platform 1 at the usual time with a huge crowd of people waiting around the Platform 1 area as well, although that train didn't appear to move so I'm not sure what they were waiting for?

Then there was the whole issue of several hundred people trying to rush all the way around to the walkway on Platform 4 single file since at the front of Platform 1 the manual gate only had one half open, no screens were working, the blue screens were saying Welcome to Connolly and the red ones were just constantly contradicting themselves.

Got onto the 7.50 to Malahide at Platform 4, which didn't depart for another ten minutes after scheduled time, in the meantime a DART came into Platform 5 heading Southbound, followed by a Northbound DART to Howth on 6 or 7 (think it was 6). A few people made a run for the Howth train when they saw it coming in thinking the Malahide one wasn't going to move, in the meantime yet another DART came into platform 3 with an enterprise set sitting in Platform 2. The Howth train departed pretty much straight after us, so maybe it was getting back to normal then.

Nobody had the faintest idea of what was going on.

TheBandicoot

Irish Rail posted this, but I have absolutely no idea what it means. Would it hurt them to proofread?

Dart services operating approximately 30mins late due to 2 separate pas sense incidents

EDIT: whoops, that is not in the right timeframe at all, sorry. Still confused by the tweet

SandyfordGuy

clearly it was a good party last night!:rolleyes: