Killucan station campaign to reopen

veryangryman

https://www.rte.ie/news/leinster/2022/0216/1281098-killucan-train/

Alot of interviews with locals and indeed, they do make a fair-ish point - add this stop and less commuter traffic will happen.

Why don't they do same? Capacity of the train? Slower slog for the poor bastrd coming from Mullingar/Sligo?

AngryLips

Opening and re-opening stations on existing lines is the simpliest and cheapest way to improve rail transport in this country ...which is why I think the DOT will never do anything about it. I still can't get over the fact that Dunleer station on the Dublin-Belfast line is closed without any initiative to do anything about it.

Zebra3

If the station is going to reopen it should come with a commitment that the area around the station is designated for development and new once off houses within a certain radius are no longer permitted.

L1011

Pre-COVID there was no capacity on the morning or evening trains, so any passengers here would be reducing capacity closer in and possibly pushing existing rail users back to the road. The extra 22000 intermediate cars should arrive this or next year though.

Additionally, it would make the journey slower for everyone further out. My opinion on this is that any further station openings West of Maynooth need to be combined with a speed or reliability increase elsewhere - so a new passing loop (the station itself is often the place for this, but Killucan already is a passing loop) or a TSR elimination - to make the end to end journey time stay the same.

While a "reopening" of a station closed that long is basically a fully new station build as it has to meet modern standards; we seem to be able to do stations for a fraction of the cost of the UK - Private Eye had a thing comparing Pelletstown at 10.5m with two platforms, bridge, ramps etc to the single platform Soham station in England costing 27m!

9320

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118639553#Comment_118639553

.....

Sam Russell

It could open on a trial basis. No extra cost involved.

flazio

I wouldn't reopen it there at its old location. Like with Oranmore, I'd move to a better location.

Looking at the map, this looks far more convenient for both Kinnegad and Killucan

Railway Cottage

https://maps.app.goo.gl/sZVVK7PkdxSA6kCR7

While we are in the neighbourhood, I have a semi related question. When the M4 was getting built, was there a plan to build a road from exit 12 off the M4 over to the old N4 at its junction with the Killucan Road. Anybody coming off there will know the road to the left (or straight on if you're coming from the M6) and then over on the old N4 coming out of Kinnegad, if you look at the entrance to the Tircroghan estate there appears to be a straight on that was never completed. 2 Tircroghan

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ieCqqTVTq1nKpoDS8

The overhead suggests the two were meant to be connected so what happened? Land owner didn’t play ball with the CPO?

L1011

Stub roads in estates are often the developer thinking there's future land to be done rather than anything more deep than that - but the other evidence here suggests it could be something - that's a very wide and straight farm access off the junction.. There may be some stuff in current or old LAPs/CDPs

flazio

Well look here.

You can clearly see an unfinished road heading towards Tircroghan and the Killucan Road, my guess is, and sorry for my shaky finger, that this was the plan with maybe a roundabout on the old N4.

LXFlyer

Opening a new station at Killucan is anything but as simple as some people might think. The easy bit is building the station itself.

The difficult bit is how you can schedule it and the impact that adding an extra stop might have. Adding an extra station means an extra three minutes lost in terms of journey time.

The most important thing to remember is that the Sligo line is single track between Maynooth and Sligo, with nine passing loops at different locations along the way (including Killucan) where trains can pass one another.

The core service is a train every two hours, which means typically trains are scheduled to pass one another at Maynooth, Edgeworthstown and Boyle, with other loops being used during peak times when extra trains run. But the timetable is constrained by where the loops are located.

For a single track railway to work, you need some "wriggle room", so typically a train travelling in one direction might have say six minutes in the schedule waiting at one passing loop, while the train it is passing has only one or two, and then at the next location where it passes a train, it might have two minutes and the other train six. That builds some resilience into the timetable, so that if one train is late for whatever reason, the knock-on effects will not carry on throughout the day,

There have been improvements in the sectional running times on the line, in other words the time taken to get from one passing loop to the next, but we have now got to the point where those improvements have been totally lost in terms of end-to-end journey time due to the loops now physically being in less than optimal locations. Those typically 6 minute waits are now ten or eleven minutes on the Sligo line because the trains are travelling faster between the loops, but the loops are still where they always were.

What is needed is for the line to be redoubled at a minimum from Maynooth to Kilcock, or Enfield, and in ideal world all the way to Mullingar. At the same time the passing loops at Edgeworthstown and Boyle would need to be extended several miles in each direction so that trains can pass one another on the move, rather than having to sit and wait at the stations. None of that would be cheap.

The main problem with adding a stop at Killucan is that I think it would render the basic two hourly service pattern next to near impossible as it would mean that trains were taking too long between Maynooth and Edgeworthstown (the typical passing locations), and there isn't a viable alternative passing pattern that would work. So you need improved infrastructure to be put in place before a new station can be added.

This is the sort of thing that the Strategic Rail Review needs to address.

Edit: Also elimination of the significant number of level crossings and accommodation (farm) crossings has to be a priority.

LXFlyer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118640319#Comment_118640319

Opening a station or reopening a closed station has significant costs - they have to meet modern safety and mobility requirements, you can't just use the old platforms, and as above, there's a significant problem in terms of scheduling services with an extra three minutes lost en route.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118649399#Comment_118649399

1. What would the cost be to open the station? Only one platform would be needed as it is a single tack line.
2. For one new stop would it affect the schedule that much? Surely they could make up three minutes on their long trip from Sligo to Connolly. It would only be for the trial period to see if those campaigning actually put their bums on the seats of the train.

Surely, reopening a long closed station should be welcomed by IR as a good news story.

LXFlyer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118650255#Comment_118650255

You would be building two platforms as Killucan is at a passing loop already.

Even if it were beyond the loop, one platform doesn’t come at zero cost. It has to be built to modern safety standards, you’d have to provide a car park and access roads.

Oranmore Station, a single platform station, cost €4.8 million, including the car park.

As for your second comment, read my first post carefully. I have pretty much explained it in copious detail. Trains have to pass each other on single track routes at passing loops, each of which are in stations on this route. Extending journey times in one section on a single track railway (and even more on this route due to the number of trains to be passed), would mean trains not arriving at loops at the optimal times to to do that. They are already pretty much at the limit as it is.

The line badly needs infrastructural improvements as I outlined above to be able to deliver any new stations, which have cost implications as well. You cannot deliver 3 minutes improved journey time without them.

flazio

I'd love to get in a time machine back to Victorian times and ask the designers of the Midland Great Western railway what were they thinking putting the station there. I imagine even back then Kinnegad would have been a fairly busy thoroughfare and out of the two roads leading out of Killucan towards the canal and their new railway, MGWR built their station on the road going nowhere instead of the halfway house between Kinnegad and Killucan. Hopefully IE don't make the same mistake.

LXFlyer

Remember that there was also a station at Hill of Down. It would have probably been better suited for Kinnegad.

Distances between stations, the canal lock, and indeed the ability to purchase land for a station would have dictated where they were located.

There were different priorities back then.

veryangryman

Following the Royal Canal is the only logical reason to put the track (and station) there. I know there's a closer to Kinnegad spot they could have put a station in but maybe they wanted it to be closer to some kind of settlement a la Killucan.

Generlaly i think theyre built as cheap as possible, avoiding bridging (which you can do if you follow a river/canal path) as much as possible.

Sam Russell

I think the Victorian railway companies were constrained by the Victorian land owners who refused to allow them build where they wanted. Consequently they found following canals to be much less contentious, plus easier construction.

Also, local population densities were quite different to now as many habitations were destroyed and the inhabitants forced off the land to allow cattle production.

9320

They weren't built primarily for passengers!

Zebra3

Fairly certain I saw somewhere that that owner of Carton House got involved with the company to have the line diverted by his gaff.

Probably loads of mad reasons for lines going where they did.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118660432#Comment_118660432

That was the canal he got diverted.

The railway company then bought the canal and built alongside it for much of the route

flazio

Well, whatever the reasons, it's all (nearly literally) ancient history now. The last thing I'll say is that had MGWR built the station on what is now the L1015 instead of the L1007, there's a higher possibility (but no guarantee) it would still be open today. But we'll never know.

Best thing for campaigners to do now is invite users of Mullingar and Enfield car parks and Kinnegad and Killucan bus stops to fill out an online survey to indicate if Killucan station would be more convenient for them and if they would use it.

LXFlyer

Actually the best thing they can do is to get Westmeath CoCo to prepare a business case for it, which they haven’t done yet.

SeanW

This sounds, at least on the surface, like a good idea. Whenever I was on the Sligo train (admittedly pre-pandemic) I always remembered having to stop at Killucan for a driver swap between "my" train and a train going the other way. Seems like a sensible idea to make use of that waiting time to serve the local community, since trains are so often waiting there anyway. My only concern with the proposal is that it seems to be middle of nowhere, so it would have to be justified either as a Park and Ride with lots of customers from the local region, or on a "build it and they will come" plan, which given how insane Dublin is, developing a commuter town at Killucan crossing might not be the worst idea.

LXFlyer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118675564#Comment_118675564

Just to correct you - virtually no trains cross at Killucan any more and there certainly aren’t driver changes there.

Only the 16:00 Connolly/Sligo and 15 :05 Sligo/Connolly (Daily), and the 18:16 Connolly/Longford and the 16:55 Sligo/Connolly (Monday-Friday) cross at Killucan with one of each passing at line speed.

As I explained above, the station needs the extra infrastructure elsewhere along the line to be in place beforehand.