DART+ (DART Expansion)

No the BEMUs won’t go to Dundalk, they will use ICRs most likely to/from Dublin, but remember that there will be an hourly Enterprise from later this year.

It will be a long time before the line is electrified to Drogheda, just a charging station there initially. Presumably it will take a couple of hours to fully charge the batteries so the plan is probably to top them up at Drogheda but still have plenty of juice in them anyway. Running on batteries all the way to Dundalk could mean more down time charging.

I get the "well if the money's there, take it" idea. But it seems a bit strange for a big continental bloc to be dealing directly with sums of money that are effectively rounding errors on their accounts.

It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where they have a big ceremony to present the Elementary School with their share of an enormous lottery windfall; a single eraser.

I'd say for the EU funding, it's more of an "apply for this stage of funding to avail of later stages of funding" type of deal, which is why the number is so small, they likely want some level of "we are putting up funds so we want some level of oversight" and so want involvement from the outset rather than being asked to hop in with the big bucks to a (potentially) dodgy/poor project and it ends up wasted.

Re-BMUs, GWR in the UK recently started in service trials of what is likely a very similar setup to what will be used at Drogheda, 3½ mins charge to run a (short) branch line of 4km. If Jacobs say 12 mins it's probably not a 1:1 ratio but that's around 16km of range (or 32km if the GWR setup can run a return shuttle on one charge)

They should look at building a new station in the north of the town and building a new depot north of that.

Must be a right chore for a lot of people in the town to get to the station.

They'd want to get back to protecting the shoreline along the Murrough first, otherwise there'll be no line to run any train, diesel or electric.

I hope it doesn't get bogged down in delays. At least we're heading into hopefully better weather now but if next winter brings a lot of easterly winds again the section along the Murrough will be in serious trouble.

Garret talked a lot of rot about being a railway enthusiast. He was, but only in the sense a butterfly collector wall mounts dead butterflies in display cabinets. In every practical respect he may as well have attempted to bulldoze DART and Luas out of existence.

To add a bit to this, it's planned as part of a national rollout scheme but doesn't have funding committed yet. Wouldn't take much work to rollout out to Wicklow if there was political interest. Dundalk to Greystones does all the heavy lifting for the corridor.

Getting power to charge trains at Wicklow would be the bigger stumbling block. If they need a new substation and land acquisition then expedience will be hard to deliver. I can't imagine they'd be happy to send BEMU trains to Wicklow with charging facilities in place from a service resilience point of view. If trains can make it to Drogheda there's a chance they could also get from Greystones to Wicklow and back, however, an issue would be if something went wrong further north and the train was stuck at Wicklow with all the auxiliaries on waiting to leave, battery could end up running out if the delay was too long.

I reckon they'll be reluctant to invest in new services to Wicklow until they know what the bill is likely to be for coastal protection. Haven't heard much about how that project is progressing. There's a lot of investment proposed for bus services along the corridor; could see a future where they propose bus-rail interchange instead of protecting the rail corridor, that kind of a call will be left for the next government. The rosslare element would be served via Waterford noted in the AISRR

If providing a shuttle south of Greystones (which I think they should if it can be fitted in along with some services into the city centre), it would probably be better/easier to have it go to Gorey and use a DMU. The BEMUs would be better used running through urban areas and to extend DART beyond the current electrified network. Using a BEMU would be nice but not necessary for such a shuttle.

our local councillor who takes an interest in public transport has said D+CS is still planned to go to consultation by the summer. I don't think any of the existing Dart line is in imminent danger - they've done a lot of work around Bray Head in recent years. I believe they looked at diverting the line as part of the protection programme and decided it was not feasible.