Irish Rail - Drivers Not Communicating to Passengers

An issue for the National Transport Authority to be made aware of perhaps?

The NTA now handle the Twitter responses, so the teeeeny tiiiny bit of info you sometimes got out of them has turned in to nothing but repeating details from the schedule and pointless plámásing.

Taken off rather than fobbed off I suspect.

Now manned by Crapita so will never be good

CTC can do platform announcements but I'm fairly sure not onboard.

I mostly find out about trains being cancelled or problems on the line, etc when I'm standing in platform and go online and see people complaining.

This was one of the issues that came out of the RAIU report for the Bray air show saga a few years back.

Driver E268 did not make any passenger announcements using the public address system
when the train came to a stop. After being stopped for five minutes and thirty-two seconds,
one of the passengers (Pax 1) who was travelling with young children and an older person,
opened a passenger door by means of the emergency opening device, and passengers
began self-detraining.

https://www.raiu.ie/assets/files/pdf/220724_self_detrainment_bray.pdf

It quite incredible how poor and non existent their communications are.

That no one takes the initiative suggests there might be corporate management culture in play that is blocking communications.

A few escaped from a train near Killester that held up things even more

I have had one or two occasions where there were delays on intercity trains out of Heuston, and where drivers gave useful and timely information. I remember when there was a fault at Sallins with the onboard CAWS system which necessitated a replacement locomotive from Inchicore. We were under way in about 40 minutes and were informed throughout what the fault was, what efforts were being made to rectify it, and eventually about a replacement loco and its ETA.

That was 30 years ago. And I have a suspicion that they do these things better on the Heuston side

30 years ago? Hardly relevant now.

Commuter train a few weeks ago, stopped dead at station, lights went out.

We got this…

Sat for 20 mins in the dark, train restarted. Arrived at destination about 30 mins late.

No further announcements. Lack of announcement for things like that pretty normal.

Any chance that there is an element of “ It’s not my job to talk to the passengers “ amongst the drivers. Now if the unions were to do a deal with management that “ compensated “ them for the effort involved perhaps the matter could be resolved.
Only speculating of course.

I do wonder how much information the driver actually has. I was on a Tralee train 2 weeks ago, and it stopped at Rathmore to wait for the outbound train, which is normal. But nothing happened for 20 minutes, and only then the driver announced there's going to be a delay of 10 more minutes. In fairness to him, once he saw the other train coming he announced we'll be on our way very soon. Still, 20 minutes with no info is quite a long wait.

While waiting, I did check the departure info on the Irish Rail app - according to that both trains were running without delays.

Not an excuse but some might consider the level of communcation needed at Connolly as a full time job!

That's truly shocking, I cannot fathom not being informed of anything for that length of time. It's especially poor as on a train people are trapped without being able to leave. Sometimes the lack of acknowledgement of an issue makes it even worse to those experiencing it.

Used to commute by train a lot for years. Found on board announcements on Maynooth line pretty good. The staff at Pearse however were dreadful. Would outright lie rather than bother looking into a query about whether a train was running. Very surly with commuters who had questions.

The fact the Belfast service has second member of staff makes no updates even more unacceptable.

The second staff member on that service should be reminded what is required of the job.

This just shows how a large proportion of guards/CSO are a complete waste of money. Typical IE culture.