Foynes Line

It is not sacrosanct, however to look at tge reality. Are you going to send goid on a train into Limerick or even down to Cork to unload onto a lorry for the last 10-20km. It's very unlikely.

Looking at Dublin will you send goods on a train to Dublin to bring them back out to even Newbridge. Is there a demand for half a freight train of goods in Portlaois. Foynes at present is mostly bulk goods, grains fir animal feedstuffs, coal etc. The grains definitely will not be loaded onto a train to unload at Cork, Galway or Portlaois to be reloaded onto trucks to distribute to Mills to process. Sone orders go actually direct to farmers yards without ever goingbto a feed mill. No mill would handle a full freight train at any one time even if it has direct access to a rail siding.

Fuel the same. A lot of forestry timver exported from Foynes. Is an exporter going to draw timber to a railway leading point to load onto a train send to Foynes evennif ot could be loaded directly onto a ship.

I had heard it was for wind turbines but again it makes little sense to load unload.

It's is not a significant container port. It would require significant investment to change that and the only way that adds up is if it is to use a railbridge to Europe

THe containers went up there yesterday?

Nope, the "we need rail freight for environmental reasons" is not thrown out the window by the existence of electric trucks! We should still electrify most of the rail network and have electric locomotives (or some sort of potentially carbon neutral locomotive) transporting freight, because an electric locomotive hauling a large amount of goods would use up less electricity than a large amount of electric trucks hauling all those goods. Remember, it's important that we stop increasing electricity consumption, and hopefully reduce it instead, for environmental reasons. The climate crisis isn't getting any better, as the rate of greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, because the rate of electricity consumption continues to grow, so it's clear that we're struggling to decarbonise the electricity grid because of this continued growth of electricity consumption. Therefore, we should be looking for ways to reduce electricity consumption so that decarbonising electricity could finally be within reach. Surely it's sensible to avoid the unnecessarily high electricity consumption of transporting all goods in BEV trucks when transporting them by electric train is a well-known less energy-intensive option. Also, carbon neutral electricity has environmental problems too, such as the damage to habitats caused by mining the materials used to make wind turbines. Obviously we're going to need a lot more wind turbines to stop the climate crisis, but we should remember that it's possible to have too many of them, and I don't know who would want to have more wind turbines blotting the landscape than what's necessary! In a nutshell, no matter what the source is of the electricity we're using, reducing the usage of it is important for environmental reasons.

By the way, I'm not saying rail freight would bring environmental benefits everywhere, but it certainly does in places where it takes lots of trucks off the road, and electric trucks aren't going to fully change that.

A driver showed me detailed images of the 201's in inchicore last night. There is no going back for those loco's. Some are in the same repair as the ones in Moyasta. He tells me there was a review completed of the locos but they just cant be brought back from the current state.

the only overhead wires in Ireland are the Dart network around Dublin. Theres plans to do the same around Cork city but that'll still leave the majority of the intercity network unelectrified

Battery electric trains do not have a large range and can go a few km down a branch line, or do some shunting on unelectrified sidings, or with the new Darts a few km beyond the end of the electrified mainline, but not the length of the country and back on a charge.

The strategic plan mentions that there'll be "bi mode electric" locos bought, from interviews thats to be an electric/ diesel or renewable fuel combination like the british class 99

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_99_%28locomotive%29

https://www.irishrail.ie/Admin/getmedia/685e9919-f012-4018-879b-06618bb536af/IE_Rail-Freight-2040-Strategy_Public_Final_20210715.pdf

The term "electric engines" is not very helpful. You can talk of Electric Multiple Units (EMUs) which draw power, usually from overhead wires, or Battery-Electric Multiple Units (BEMUs) which have electric traction motors, taking power either from batteries or from the overhead wires. The practice with BEMUs in Ireland will be to charge the batteries at special charging stations, such as Drogheda. They will not re-charge from the overhead. This may be because to do so would strain the capacity of the overhead wires to supply enough power for trains using the line. I'm not sure if they could charge on the go if the netweok were beefed up. Whether EMU of BEMU, trains will have dynamic (regenerative ) braking which uses to traction motors to convert kinetic energy into electric energy. In the case of Irish BEMUs I understand that this will at least partially re-charge the batteries en route.

Well the fact that it's not happening and there's no talk of electrifying the rail network beyond Cork to Belfast doesn't mean that electrification of more of the network is a bad idea.
I really don't accept your claim that "as long as it is coming from a zero emissions sources like wind power [using an unnecessarily large amount of electricity to transport goods by trucks] isn't so important, not from an environmental perspective," and I have already given reasons why I don't accept it in my post you've just quoted.
We might very well see battery electric trucks regularly on our motorways before we see any electric freight locomotives, but that doesn't stop any of my points from standing.

I never said that decarbonising road freight wasn't important. It is a complete misrepresentation of my post to claim I wanted to ignore 99% of freight.

Again, I know we don't have electric locomotives or advanced plans for them, but that's no reason to stop pointing out that they would be more efficient than unnecessarily large quantities of battery electric trucks.

BEV truck is ut xan be charged at night and work during the day. Electric trains would be using daytime electricity . The other factor is point to point delivery. A truck can deliver point to point. A train will require freight delivered or offloaded from it by a truck at some stage. This is why rail is more suited to.long distance haulage. As well trucks can do multi point delivery of part loads to unlimited locations.

At best 2050 we may see the major rail routws electrified ir being in the process of being electrified such as Dublin to Belfast, Cork, Linerick and Galway. However it may never happen as BEV trucks will still have the advantage of using off peak electricity

What has all this to do with then Foynes Line?

And add a rail utility company that at present dose very little rail freight

Should have opened the South Wexford line instead. The situation regarding Foynes right now is pure banana republic.

The South Wexford line was closed not all that long ago for a reason. What has changed to justify re-opening now?

Apart from when one drives across you. A reduction in HGV traffic benefits everyone (apart from the vested interests)