[Article] DART partly closed at WEEKENDS for 18 months

I understand that this arrangement (called a blockade, closing the lines completely for a number of weekends) is becoming more common in the UK, but the usual practice is that

1. there is about 22 weeks of notice given to passengers (it takes this long to plan rail works of this magnitude anyway).

2. three months is about as long as they usually do it for. 9 months is definitely a pretty long period to have a blockade in place.

3. there is some consultation with rail users. There are pretty influential user groups around the South-East of the UK in particular. There is no reason why there wouldn't be the same on the DART. Some of the richest and most powerful people in the country live along the line and a surprising number of them use it to travel to/from work.

It is hard to understand why they need to close for such a long time. Could a lot of the works not be carried out in-tandem, rather than sequentially? It would be different if there was major rail renewal being done, and specialised teams and equipment were needed, but a lot of the work (for example extending platforms and modifying station layouts) is just general building work. The overhead cables are being replaced, granted, but surely this doesn't require 145 days' work to get finished? Wouldn't it be possible to have some of the inner stations open, even if the outer stations stay closed?

Also, the rail and sleepers are going to have to be renewed at some stage, sooner or later. If it takes 18 months just to replace the cables, how long will it take to do this job?

Originally posted by Borzoi
Ignoring the random insults..


To hold up the Brits as been a good example of rail management is ludicrous. Or in a smaller word just for you: mad.

The UK rail industry has many big problems, all due to chronic underfunding and ridiculous management structures imposed by various governments over the last half century. Now that they have been forced to invest in large scale infrastrucure upgrading work they are using large-scale weekend line posessions to get the work done, just as IE are now doing. In some cases they have had to resort to complete closures for several months to get the work done


Taken from above link:

11 July 2004 - continuously until 05 September 2004
Anglia Railways
First Great Eastern
Manningtree - Ipswich

Harwich International - Ipswich
London Liverpool Street - Ipswich - Norwich
Ipswich - Harwich International
Ipswich rail tunnel closed for rebuilding the railway track
The railway will be closed completely through Ipswich Tunnel . No direct trains between Ipswich and London
Some direct services between London and Norwich will be provided via an alternative route during weekday peak periods

Secondly, most of the closures mentioned are short term, the longest I saw was three months, but there are more where the work is happening at night.

Of course there will be many short term closures for relatively minor work, that is hardly the point. 3 months including partial weekday posessions is hardly short term (the first item on that page). Long term closures are necessary anywhere large scale work has to be carried out, that is just a fact of railway engineering.

Thirdly, most closures mentioned are rural, where bus tranfers will work using motorways. The urban closures that I saw were for London underground, which has redundancy built in to much of its route structure, ie they'll still get you quite near to wheere you want to go, even if one line is partly closed. I used to live there, I know this. Not something you can say here..

If you lived in the UK then you should be aware of how congested the motorways from Yorkshire all the way to the south coast are. Out of that entire page only a handful of the closures are on lines that could be classed as rural, others are on some of the most intensively used inter-city lines in Europe where even minor diversions causes hours of delays to tens of thousands of passengers each day.
Redundancy in London Underground, you must be joking, it is one of the most overcrowded metro systems in the world All central London stations have crowd control procedures where they restrict the numbers of passengers entering stations in the event of minor delays. When complete sections have had to be closed there has been huge transport problems throughout London as a result.

Forthly, bus tranfers, the idea that doubling the number of 46As from Dun Laoghire will compensate for the DART is a joke. The 46A take about 1:10min from DL to town, again I used for years going to and forth from college. The Dart, about 22 mins - so the difference is about an hour, each way, twice a day, 4 hours each weekend gone. More if you live further away. Have you ever used the 84?

1. the 46a has a frequency of approx 10 mins so double that will be 5mins. on a Saturday you can easily wait over 20 mins before getting on a DART.

2. On a Saturday or Sunday I would expect the 46a overall journey time to be a little less than 1 hour.

3. If you travelled for years between Dun Laoghaire and town, did you ever notice how the 46a is not the most direct route? How much time would you have saved by using the 7? FYI Dun Laoghaire - City Centre by 7 on Saturday approx 30-45 mins depending on time of day.

4. Yes I have used the 84, it takes longer than the train, I never said it didn't. Lots of people use these bus services every day and their lives aren't ruined by it. People will have to make alternative arrangements for a while, their journeys will take longer. There are frequent bus services operating a short walk away from all southside DART stations, with the exception of Killiney where the roads are too narrow for busses. Most people in Dublin do not have any rail service to use at any time, the only public transport available being bus services that are crippled by the traffic congestion in the city.

Fifthly, IE is a public transport company, it's job is to provide a service to the public. The priority should be that, the €176 million to do the works comes from the tax payer, so that gives us (well me, I'm a taxpayer, I don't know about you) a vested interest in seeing it used right. I would not begrudge extra money being used to make sure that the work was done with less disruption.

By the way I don't use the DART anymore, I don't live that side of the city these days.

Nice points MadsL, if only!

Yawn, Yawn, Yawn. The good old I am a taxpayer rant, bring it out (along with the personal insults) when you run out of relevant points to make. Earlier in your post you inferred that I am too stupid to understand words with more than three letters. Now you suggest, albeit unintentionally that I am a genius, that I can do the impossible and live in Ireland without paying any tax. Which is it? I will answer that one myself, it is the latter. Yes I am the only person in Ireland who has never paid a cent (or penny) in tax, anyone who wants to know my secret just send me a blank cheque in the post and I will sort you out, I promise;)

http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/topstories/1635612?view=Eircomnet

DART to run an extra weekend as Brennan intervenes
From:ireland.com
Thursday, 9th October, 2003

Iarnród Éireann made further concessions in its plans for weekend closure of Dublin's DART service in the run up to Christmas.

The changes which follow the intervention of the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, yesterday, will now mean that DART will operate fully for the three weekends preceding Christmas.

Iarnród Éireann's spokesman Mr Barry Kenny said yesterday that suspending the work during the busy Christmas shopping period could leave the company open to cost overruns and delays.

The Department of Transport announced last night that it did "not expect there to be any excess in the €170 million budget and fully expects the three weekends out of the 75 weekend contract period can be made up in the valley period after Christmas."

In a strongly worded statement the Department said the full extent of the proposed closures had only been brought to the Minister's attention on Monday evening when he was personally briefed on them by the chairman of CIÉ, Dr John Lynch who is also the chairman of Iarnród Éireann.

Mr Brennan expressed concern for the Christmas shopping period which is one of the busiest periods of the year for DART but he was also sharply critical of Iarnród's Éireann's "failure to communicate either the closure or the fairly good alternative transport arrangements to its customers", the Minister's spokesman said last night.

The new arrangements follow a day of tough talking between Iarnród Éireann and the Department with an initial offer from Dr Lynch to keep just two weekends operational in the December run up to Christmas, rejected as unacceptable by the Minister.

Iarnród Éireann had planned from the beginning of this year to close DART stations between Grand Canal Basin and Greystones from this coming weekend until the middle of next year to allow a major modernisation programme to go ahead.

The modernisation programme includes lengthening platforms, improving footbridges, working on power lines and new sidings for extra DART trains.

The company spokesman Mr Kenny said yesterday that while the disruption was regrettable the public had spent much of the summer listening to cost overruns and delays with other infrastructure projects and they did not want to hear this of DART.

He said work would go on at night as well as at weekends, and the company had a good record on bringing in projects on time and under budget.

Mr Kenny said the Department had known for months of the plans to begin work in the autumn, while the Sunday Tribune took advertisement space in this newspaper yesterday to point out it had reported on the planned closures on September 7th.

The Department spokesman said the Minister was "firmly of the view" that the company had failed to advise its customers of the detail and extent of the closures and added that the Minister was looking forward to a new public information campaign.

Originally posted by Syth
On the continent they had the intelligence to make all of their platforms dead straight.

Let me see, because Pearse - Dun Laoghaire (Old) was the first commuter railway in the world .... E\/4R!!!!11!!!!1

Originally posted by kamobe
If they can do it, why can't we? We'll sit here and bark about it, yet on Saturday those lazy sh1theads are still gonna screw over half the city on weekends.

"half the city" - I presume you mean the posh half?

Last time I checked DART only serves part of the city, so closing half of the DART does not "screw over half the city on weekends".

And think of it this way, the number 7 or 46A will get you closer to Grafton Street, where you can hang out with your posh mates.

Originally posted by kamobe
I live in Blanchardstown, work in Bray, and go to college in Maynooth. The only way I can do this is using the trains.

Have you been telling fibs? There appears to be no train that could have done it anyway (first arrival 0929). However there are plenty of busses you can get.

[url=http://www.irishrail.ie/your_journey/timetables_junction1.asp?radioservice1=1&txtFromStation=Clonsilla&txtToStation=Bray&status=D&FirstSelectDay=04&FirstSelectMonth=10&fromtime=01&totime=09&optionWalk=yes&optionBus=yes&Submit.x=33&Submit.y=11]Search Parameters: 
From Station: Clonsilla  
To Station: Bray  
Arrival/Departure: Departure  
Date: 04/10  
Between: 01:00 and 09:00  

Dep. Sta. Clonsilla 
Arr. Sta.  Bray 
Date  04/10/2003 
Dep. Time  0817 
Arr. Time 0929
Changes  0 
Service  Arrow

[/url]

route 39 to city First bus on Saturday 6.30am

route 45 to Bray First bus on Saturday 6.50am

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1061154&issue_id=9910

THE core element of the upgrade which will see Dart services disrupted for 18 months could be done in a matter of hours, say transport experts.

Services north and south of the Liffey will each be closed every weekend for nine months, but use of the latest construction technology could eliminate the bulk of the stoppages.

The most time-consuming element of the so-called 'Dash' project will be the extension of platforms at each of the 25 Dart line stations, allowing trains to carry two extra carriages.

Railway industry insiders say the most cost-effective way to extend platforms is to use prefabricated steel-framed extensions which don't require heavy machinery for fitting and which can be fitted without disrupting routine services.

Engineers say dedicated teams could fit the extensions at all 25 Dart stations in little more than a day



Why does this not surprise me??

Can't believe I've agreed to leave Oz to go back home to all that sh*te.

Originally posted by antoinolachtnai

Was anyone near the southern DART line over the weekend? Anyone see what kind of work they were actually doing?

Antoin.

There was a jcb digger sitting on the line between Seapoint and Blackrock on saturday morning with 6 lads sitting on it enjoying the early morning sunshine for an hour or two.

Originally posted by kamobe
The train combination that was open to me previously was

Castleknock 0734 Bray 0843 InterCity.

Apologies, the timetable on the website mislead me (possibly because I couln't search into the future as there were to be no trains and had to search based on the previous Saturday), but yes the printed version of the timetable does confirm your story.

Originally posted by Victor
Midnight Friday to 5am Monday = 53 hours. Allowing for set-up and clear-up times perhaps 45-50 productive hours.

all the do is drink tea, they wouldn't now what work is like the council bunch of wasters

Sarsfield writes:

There is a discussion earlier on this thread about train length vs train frequency

Nobody mentions the series of level crossings between serpentine and merrion gates.

To allow these gates to be raised at all during the peak times, there has to be a certain gap between trains. This limits southside frequency regardless of anything else. Doesn't it?

Well, it all depends on how long you leave the gates down for before the train comes. It does appear to me that the gate-down time at certain level crossings (the ones immediately beside stations) could be greatly reduced if there was a will. The train has to slow down to stop at the platform, so it is only going through the junction at a very low speed anyway. You would think that would mean that the 1- or 2-minute halting of traffic would be unnecessary. (Of course this wouldn't work for Merrion Gates.)

It also has to do with practice. Some lines in Tokyo, have many level crossings on them, despite being very busy and crossing major roads. The reason they are able to do it is because drivers are trained to drive directly into a crossing with vehicular traffic on it. The gates only come down at almost the last moment. (see p. 70 of http://gulliver.trb.org/publications/tcrp/tcrp_rpt_13-c.pdf if you don't believe me.)

Also, listening to the IE spokesperson on the radio talking about why they didn't use prefabricated platforms, it sounds like there is a lot of work to be done with moving embankments and such. Maybe that is the case, and that is fair enough, but why didn't they say that in their original press release?

Antoin

the paper about the way the japanese do it is worth reading. It does obviously depend on a high level of compliance by road users.

Near stations, it should be possible to brake to such a speed that the train could be completely stopped before the level crossing if necessary, no? This wouldn't reduce operating speeds much, because the train has to stop anyway, at the platform.

Obviously, even a low-speed collision with a train is going to be fairly devastating.

antoin.

I spoke to some senior Irish Rail guys on Monday and the stations are getting complete workovers, hence the extended closures.

As regards the level crossings, Merrion Gates is the only one that can be "easily" bridged (i.e. demolish everything from old station to that white call centre building by Booterstown Marsh, but put an office tower in their place) at a cost of maybe €15m as part of the Eastern bypass. That would allow Merrion Station reopen safely. The other crossings would mean either raising (noise issue) or lowering (flooding issue) a huge length of track (close entire railway for 6-18 months) or roads (would make it difficult for local residents to access their properties).