Navan Rail Line

Anyone hear anything about the Navan line in the Infrastructure announcement?

I too feel a new railway line shouldn't start at Navan. That line goes all the way to kells and the Drogheda Navan line went up to kingscourt. Seeing as Kells is already on the Navan line and it's population is 3 times higher then kingscourt I think Kells should be the starting point.

You could prioritise some of the new housing developments for Kells and it's population would be over 10k in no time.

There's another line from Trim that connects to the Navan line south of Navan heading to Dublin. Would it be worth reopening Trim? Population of 10k and in the current housing crisis any of these new rail commuter belt stations can easily see it's population increased by a few thousand.

Not a chance of a spur to Trim, as there is already a Maynooth spur on the line into Connolly which has Sligo trains as well.

While I would like to see the line extended to Kells eventually, I don't think it makes sense to extend it to Kells from the start. The 13-14km of rail needed would be a relatively easy section of track to build, especially since the track could be ran along the M3 most of the way reducing the CPO and build cost. However to build that as a part of the Navan line project would be increasing the length of the line by about a third, which would of course come with significant cost.

Truthfully I think there is a long list of projects with higher priority, and more imporantly a list of towns that will need to see a rail intervention first. The example that comes to my mind is Ashbourne, as compared to Kells its much larger, much closer to Dublin, and has already seen insane growth. Without a rail intervention Ashbourne is on track to becoming "Swords 2.0" or "Navan 2.0." Now that said Ashbourne is more likely to be served by some form of light rail project by TII rather than a heavy rail project by IE, but still there is only so much funding to go around.

In the interim I think Kells could recieve improved bus services and still be well served for a while to come. Especially there will likely be a number of services introduced to link the various towns surrounding Navan with the Navan line.

As for Trim that is much more complicated, unlike Kells where the line could simply be extended, Trim would have to be a branch line. That alone makes the investment difficult to justify as it limits how the services can operate, and I think makes the project infeasible. Also thinking about more than just rail, the long term bus service solution for Trim will depend heavily on whether IE chooses to route the Navan line west or east of the M3 and/or Dunshaughlin. What option they pick will likely have a large effect on the population growth of Trim, especially compared to other towns in Meath with better access to the Navan line.

'Improved bus services' is an excuse for maintaining car dependency. Otherwise, the NX would have stopped all talk about extending rail to Navan, as Jacobs thought it would. One of Official Ireland's ways of reinventing the wheel is to talk about limiting suburban development, as if forcing people into their cars when they can't afford housing closer to Dublin is something praiseworthy for some unknown reason.

'Improved bus services' is an excuse for maintaining car dependency.

I don't disagree that it has been used to curtail rail improvements and that people have argued for 'Improved bus services' to try and quash proper PT investment. Just thinking of some of the objections to ML there were some egregious misunderstandings(if not just blatant lies) of how PT and capacity works. However pretending that rail is a one-size-fits-all answer to transportation also doesn't work as there are many cases where bus transport is the preferred option. Even the AISRR acknowledges this. In this case it's just that there is a difference between Navan, one of the largest towns in the country and second largest without a rail connection, and a small Meath town almost 60km from Dublin.

I would like to see the line extended to Kells and I think a provisional alignment should be protected. However unfortunately there are currently higher priority projects, some of which may even be needed to get any meaningful capacity out of the line. Such as the Maynooth-Adamstown link, and even then the Maynooth and Navan lines may need a flyover junction to avoid impacting capacity too much. On the more extreme side of things DU may even be needed.

Is there a draft of the route from Maynooth to the Heuston line?

Whenever the Western and Southwestern lines are joined, I can see it being used primarily to bring Inter City and regional services on the Western line into Heuston instead of Connolly, thus freeing the Western Line approaches for DART and easing some of the congestion issues at Connolly.

Four North will segregate the Belfast services from DART, but a widening project like this isn’t going to be easy for the Western line, so the only way to separate the services is to bring IC trains onto the “fast” tracks into Heuston. This also provides a better return on investment for those “fast” tracks.

Having the junction between Maynooth and Leixlip would preserve the existing Maynooth stop for the fairly high numbers using it on the Sligo line - college students etc. But they could also just transfer at Kilcock if it's West of Maynooth… I imagine land values may be a deciding factor.

Probably not. The two options for a Celbridge station would be to either slow down the track to get the line closer to the town, or to keep the line as fast as possible and simply place a station on the line where ever happens to be closest to Celbridge. The first option would start to defeat the purpose of the of the line, and the second would struggle to pass a CBA test (just the station that is) as the DART station would be a similar distance but with much better service.

Additionally if they were to make a Celbridge station it would have to have commuter service in addition to the Sligo and outer commuter services, as otherwise there is a chance the Sligo services would become over crowded with people looking for a quick journey into Heuston. However at the same time there would then be the logistical issues of adding another branch to the core DART network. It is the same problem that proposals reopening the branch to Trim on the Navan line or adding a station in Swords as a part of the M1 alignment create