Western Railway Corridor Expansion

I like trains.

Similar to how an Audi A8 is typically considered superior to a Toyota Yaris despite having minor differences in practical functionality, trains provide a far superior user experience than buses or cars and now that we're supposedly rich I reckon it could be time for a big idea.

I, personally, would love it if there was a double-tracked electric railway running directly from Derry to Cork. There's a single line most of the way so open that back up, widen it where possible, stick in another line for the opposite direction where not and widen all the stations. New rail tracks should absolutely be purchased and constructed if necessary.

With a reasonably fast train the likes of the main one from Cork to Dublin, the journey could probably be done in ~5 hrs. (less than twice the distance from Cork to Dublin which takes 2.5 hrs). Let's say we add in a bunch of stops, maybe like 14 exactly, we could call it 6 hrs which is about what it would take to drive down the West Coast anyway. It can accelerate pretty quickly from stops anyway because of the electricity.

This line would be useful to pretty much everyone in the northwest, west, midwest and southwest regions, with easily well over a million people benefitting from it and it would be able to connect to three different international airports and four different cities with a combined urban population of over 600000. It would massively counteract the Dublin-centric nature of our transport system, would connect up the whole western half of the country, and is the missing link in what would be an entire island-round public transport loop.

Such an infrastructure investment could drive redevelopment of the western region, both through the creation of jobs, but more importantly through the improvement of the quality of life for residents of the west, with easy public transport access to a far wider range of places. Such an investment would have huge cultural potential because as they say, "the West's the best" and linking it up properly at last would create a huge cultural group who would be very happy, great craic and unquestionably make the world a far better place. Such a line would also enable the growth of the smaller towns and centres along it as they become commutable hubs to the larger cities.

If the line was sufficiently subsidised as I personally believe all public transport should be, it would be massively utilised, as was demonstrated with the reopening of the now hugely popular Limerick-Galway line. Build it, make it cheap and they will come. For anyone who's lived on the continent, cheap long-distance trains are a blessing, and sitting for 6 hours on a train with a book or chatting with a fellow passenger as it cruises down the west coast would be worth the trip in and of itself.

I think this would be a complete game changer for life in the west and regardless of the cost, we should just crack on, fire a load of money at it and build something life-changing for the future.