Flightshaming to London from Dublin

Brian CivilEng

KevRossi wrote: »

No ships on the Irish Sea routes have gangways AFAIK, you're taken onto the boat with a bus and you are dropped off on the car deck in my experience over the past few years.

The Ulysses still has a gangway. But I think you are right about all the other regular ferries.

Irish Ferries use the Epsilon on some routes, and don't take foot passengers at all on that ship.

Vic_08

markpb wrote: »

What's the reason for that? Is it commercial or because those ships don't have passenger gangways?

The ship they use on the second rotation is Epsilon which has a lower capacity, it is also a stern only loader which may be an issue with taking a shuttle bus back off after dropping off passengers.

Neither make it impossible to take foot passengers, the Stena Merey and Stena Lagan that currently sail on Liverpool - Belfast are very similar design sister ships and those sailings do take foot passengers.

Irish Ferries just seem to have a policy not to take any on Epsilon, not even when it is the next sailing for disrupted passengers, which happens when the afternoon swift fast ferry is cancelled, cars get put on Epsilon, foot passengers are expected to wait for the evening sailing with over 4 hours overnight wait for a train in Holyhead.

When other ships have been covering that turn they have taken foot passengers but only on the two day sailings not the night ones, I don't know why. As the similar timed Stena sailings do take foot passengers it is not a big issue (except for displaced IF passengers) particularly as the new Stena Estrid will be on that turn and would be my preference anyway.

KevRossi wrote: »

No ships on the Irish Sea routes have gangways AFAIK, you're taken onto the boat with a bus and you are dropped off on the car deck in my experience over the past few years.

Passenger gangways are not a feature of ferries in general, all that the ship has is a doorway or exit point on an open deck. If provided gangways are part of the port infrastructure. Only the primary berth at Dublin terminal 1 that Irish Ferries use has one, which is relatively modern and is adjustable so can connect with a range of docking locations. The side berth at T1 that IF use for some Swift sailings and Epsilion, T2 that Stena use and both berths at Holyhead do not have gangways.

snotboogie

smelly sock wrote: »

Employers should cop on and put policies in place to use VC's rather than pointless needless travel.

I am currently running a global project entirely remotely, it's a ****ing nightmare. People pay far more attention face to face and give you more time after meeting face to face. The intangibles of human interaction matter, communication is much easier in person, especially when complex topics are being discussed and multiple people are giving inputs.

goingnowhere

Stena used to use gangways at both Rosslare and Fishguard, there seems to have been an issue with the Fishguard arrangement so is now a bus

Last ship to have a proper experience was the HSS

Gekko

I do Dublin-London and back once or twice a month by plane and if there was a sleeper bus or train plus ferry package I’d at least consider it

It’d want to be the standard of business class on a plane though. Comfort and timings would be the key.

Peregrinus

Gekko wrote: »

I do Dublin-London and back once or twice a month by plane and if there was a sleeper bus or train plus ferry package I’d at least consider it

It’d want to be the standard of business class on a plane though. Comfort and timings would be the key.

Back in the day, if I had to go to London on business, I would take the boat from Dun Laoghaire and then a sleeper on the Irish Mail. (I'm showing my age here, I know.) After a night's sleep and a 7:00 am cup of tea served by the steward I'd get breakfast, and then stroll into the London office in fine form at about 8:40, demanding to know why the other participants in the meeting weren't here yet. By contrast, colleagues who got up at 4:30 am in order to make an early flight when they needed to go to meetings in London were generally pretty shattered.

So, yeah, it was good. But, even then, doing in that style was as expensive as flying, maybe more so. Now the boat/train journey is a much poorer experience (and this is unlikely to change) while the air journey is much cheaper.

KevRossi

I think that the options are fairly limited when leaving from Ireland, we lose a lot of time just doing the first 120 Km to Holyhead, with boarding and waiting on a train at the other end, you can calculate 5.5 hours for this leg and about 9 hours to London. That's another 470Km from Holyhead.

Other comparisons:
Berlin to Paris - 8 hours - 1,050 Km
Amsterdam - Munich - 9 hours - 850 Km
Barcelona - Seville - 6 hours - 1140 Km
Rome - Zurich - 7 hours - 900 Km

These all have connections, they're not through trains, but it shows the amount of ground you can cover in half a day, and this doesn't include night trains.

If you want to go Dublin - Paris or Brussels then you're looking at 13-14 hours with connections.

In this time you could do Brussels - Rome, Berlin - San Sebastian or similar.

I think we are saddled in Ireland with train and boat being far less convenient and probably more expensive, than the plane for the foreseeable future. I'll take the train and boat when I've got time, or if I'm on the bike, but the plane will win for convenience most times.

SeanW

Thelonious Monk wrote: »

well you should try and think about your actions and the effects they have on the planet, we all should. You wont though, like most people, and that is why we are f*cked as a species.

The thing is, a lot of people who tell others "you should think about the effect of your choices on the planet/the human race" are in literally no position to do so.

Most of the mainstream environmental movement advocates against the use of nuclear electricity. This is despite that nuclear power is literally the easiest way to totally decarbonise an electricity grid. At this moment in time, France is emitting 36g/kwh for the energy that it produces and uses, most of which is nuclear. In contrast "woke" countries like Ireland and Germany all have figures many multiples of this.

The reason is that while Ireland and Germany have both spent vast sums of money on weather based "renewables" (which are anything but, they're horrible for the environment in reality) these power plant types only produce power during favourable weather conditions. As a consequence, CO2/KWH stats can only be lowered rather than cut heavily, and at an extraordinary economic and ecological costs.

Yet the same kind of people that are promoting this garbage are the same ones telling us "you should be ashamed of your choices" should be the first to look in the mirror.

As to why this might be happening, many of us have suspected for some time that mainstream environmental activism is merely a cover for something much more sinister. That suspicion was strengthened with Alexandria Ocasio Cortezs' "Green New Deal" which was basically just Communism with Green Kool-Aid. Proof has come from the illustrious Saint Greta of Stockholm, when she wrote for Project Syndicate that Climate Change was more a symptom than a problem.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/climate-strikes-un-conference-madrid-by-greta-thunberg-et-al-2019-11

Greta Thunberg wrote:

That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.

Emphasis mine.

At the very least, we know that a large amount of the thinking behind climate change alarmism is geared around a utopian ideal of forcing people to "live ecologically" often in line with feminist, socialist and "anti-colonial" ideals.

Those people should be called upon to make ideological sacrifices - for example, by supporting nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels - before they are allowed to tell us "consider your choices". How about YOU consider YOUR choices BEFORE you ask me to do the same? Until the mainstream environmental left is willing to do that, they can go take a long walk off a short pier as far as I am concerned.

cnocbui

Nice try, but you can't talk sense to greenies.

trellheim

Interesting set of responses if you filter out the extremes.

Railway ferries is pie-in-the-sky I think .

Electric trains - the line to Holyhead is not electrified - you need to get to Chester for that so it has its own diesel footprint.

If there was a sleeper train that ran to and from Holyhead that would be ideal for work but without aviation fuel tax then it would not be in the least competitive as that is a massive distortion .


In my view anything that might avoid Dublin airport is worth considering if its even half useful