Cross-border review of rail network officially launched

I wouldn't dream of taking money away from any of those things. Like I said, even if it annoys some people, I think there should be an increase in taxes.

I really don't accept that improvements should only be made to rural railways in Ireland after Dublin has the Metro, 150km of luas lines and the DART on all heavy railways in a 50km radius. The Dublin Area Transport Strategy says that Dublin won't have all those things for at least 20 years (post 2042 is what it says). Is it crazy to want to wait less than 20 years for (as an example) more frequent services on the Limerick-Nenagh-Ballybrophy and the Limerick Junction-Waterford railways (both of which typically have just 2 trains a day)?

True, but because we will putting almost all work out to tender, we will be limited by the availability and structure of various contractors.

I.e. it might be theoretically feasible to double staff count on a project to build it faster, but if none of the tender offers want to risk putting that much staff on one project then we have to make do with whats available.

There are also limitations to resources and staffing that can be given to a project because of the logistics - when building a house you will reach a point where throwing more brickies will not get the walls up any faster, you get better delivery by spreading staffing across multiple units. Same will apply to some of these transport infra projects too, we will get better delivery times across multiple projects by proceeding many in parallel.

So, I've reviewed the EY report from 2020 on WRC phase 2 and 3 (Athenry to Claremorris), which concluded a CBA of 0.21. I'm calling absolute utter horse crap on this report. It made basic, very significant, errors and questionable assumptions throughout. One can only conclude that EY were biased against the project in their analysis.

Journey Time:

The report assumes a capex to bring the line up to 150kmh design speed, and yet it assumes Tuam-Galway direct services would take 50mins versus 40mins by car. The real comparison, based on EY's own assumptions, should be 35mins (by train) versus 60mins (by car). This is a fundamental error which pulls the entire report into question.

The report includes -0.87m economic benefit (negative) due to Time Saving. This should, minimum, be +0.87 but in reality, much higher.

Tourists (wait for it)....:

EY assume 23,000 tourist journeys annually on the line, both domestic and international. This equates to 2 tourists, TWO, on each train. TWO!!! Imagine, a line linking Galway and Westport!!!!! Even assuming an additional 10x tourists on each train, 10euro single ticket, that would equate to 1.1m extra revenue (versus 2.2m total assumed).

The report uses Borders Railway (Edinburgh to Tweedbank) as an example of a "city to rural" line to compare tourist numbers, which conclude 4% of journeys would be tourists. If you read about this railway you'll see why it is BS. This line has shattered expectations with 184,000 journeys in 2016 for Tweekbank versus a predicted 19,000. A report in 2016 concluded that 40k car journeys were taken off the roads (versus a predicted 60k). Tourism numbers increased 12% in 2016 and the 2017 report indicated that 23% of visitors would not have gone there without the line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_Railway

The fact that EY used this line as a proxy but failed to consider how successful that line has been speaks to their bias.

Noise:

The report includes -1.35m economic benefit (negative) due to train noise. This, despite the report assuming 18x lorry journeys are removed and replaced by one freight train. This is BS, so let's call that zero (it should be positive).

Emissions:

The report includes -0.02m economic benefit (negative) for emissions. But this is based on 50mins train versus 40mins car, which is totally incorrect based on the EY's own assumptions. The -0.02m number should be positive.

Fare prices / Revenue:

The report assumes 4.11eur for a single Tuam-Galway ticket, but assumes 4.28eur assumed for Athenry-Galway?!... A Tuam-Dublin fare was assumed to cost 7.01eur. This compares to Galway-Dublin or Claremorris-Dublin fares in 2023 of 16eur. EY's assumption for revenue is massively understated.

Summary:

The entire report is rubbish. The errors made on time (rail versus car) bring every number in the report into question. Even if I make some basic adjustments (extra tourist revenue, no noise impact, positive time savings), the CBA immediately improves from 0.21 to 0.5. This is before reviewing their 'demand generation' assumptions for accurate journey time comparisons.

Here's a snippet from the report to show how biased EY have been. Their tone and attitude throughout the report is v.loaded and negative and cannot be considered impartial.

In particular, the WRC should encourage people to move to areas on the North-West Coast (North of Galway City),  supporting the development of those communities. However, most of these individuals will likely be drawn from other locations in Ireland (such as Dublin or Galway City), meaning the benefit to the Irish economy as whole will be limited. 

I presume you are referring to Package 3b which is a large scale option connecting all the way up to Derry including an electrified track between Sligo and Athenry. The report rules this out as not viable. However it does recommend that Athenry to Claremorris portion would make sense. So the report clearly rejects the full package but permits the scaled back version. This is consistent with what Eamon Ryan has said all along. I'm not sure where you get the 'work of fiction' idea from based on this information.

"West Coast: This Package delivers some benefits in regional and rural connectivity, and could support freight movements along the West Coast of Ireland. However, it does this at a relatively high environmental and financial cost. Its BCR is on the lower end of the regional and rural packages. That said, there are some elements of this Package, such as the relatively affordable section between Athenry and Claremorris, which deliver material improvements to freight and rural connectivity and can therefore be taken forward."

But we do have the money over 30 years for these projects. Unless a black hole erupts in our finances we can easily afford all these infra plans for the next 30+ years.

And for the labour argument - none of the labour force for offshore wind, house insulation retrofits, broadband etc have any crossover with our planned rail projects. Its a complete red herring

.....

Feel like we're going around in circles on this. Are there any current rail projects which either we're in the rail review but were assessed to be nonviable, or ones that don't feature at all, that you would prefer to spend money on?

If there is known then this entire discussion is academic because regardless of whether you like / dislike projects, we will proceed with the ones which have the highest CBA first.

So if you hate WRC with a passion, and think Letterkenny doesn't deserve rail, don't worry it likely won't even begin for another 25 years

If we capped draw downs on such a fund at 2%, much like the Norwegians do, that is still just over 3bn a year which can be spent on capital projects. Well over double what the AIRR proposes spending.

On the point of labour, there is very much a cross-over, Ireland is not a place to be a specialist and in my discipline, Civil Engineering, we would frequently move between those different industry. My design team is at 50% of what it was in 2019, we have lost people to work on datacentres, electrical infrastructure, metrolink and bus connects. We also have people who resigned during COVID and founded companies that do surveying for all the projects listed above. Some left the industry entirely. We haven't the people.

I never said it should be prioritised over the Galway-Dublin line. I'm just pushing back against people on here saying it shouldn't be done at all and also those misquoting the AIRR report. Galway-Dublin would have priority based on pure economics but projects like Claremorris to Athenry would evidently be a quick win in terms of the amount of time needed to carry out the work and lack of planning obstacles.

There are still people campaigning for the WRC to go to Sligo but I'm not in that camp. I accept the recommendations of the report, in terms of whats realistic.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.