Rosslare EuroPort (Crap Trains)

I was on the 15.05 Sligo to Connolly Intercity service (arriving 18:18) yesterday which arrived in at platform 5 and turned into the 18:28 Connolly to Wexford service. Must be the longest continuous service in Ireland, and is bookable as a through service.

Yes, just over 6 hours for Sligo to Wexford and I'd say about 350km. The through train appears to be available once daily, only in one direction, on weekdays, and is not advertised as such, presumably so that in the event that the Sligo to Dublin leg is delayed significantly, they can utilise another train from Dublin.

Dublin to Tralee looks to be about 330km (as the railway goes, not as the crow flies).

agreed but as a long time user of the line it's not one bit of a surprise, the contempt shown to passengers by the company is second to none.

other routes aren't perfect but there is a particular contempt shown to users of the rosslare line that is not shown to almost every other line.

The 05:45 Gorey to Connolly service actually runs through to Drogheda as the same train. It arrives in Connolly at 07:48 and continues to Drogheda at 07:50. It was shown years ago on the timetable as one service but now is shown as two separate ones. There was also a service from Rosslare many years ago departing around 05:35 then continued to Sligo and was shown as one service in the timetable. Some other unusual services I remember off the top of my head were Arklow to Waterford, Bray to Longford and Limerick Junction to Enniscorthy.

Re skipping stops, some time ago (probably over 20 years at this stage), most trains ran from Bray to Pearse or Connolly (depending on the terminus) non-stop. Obviously, it was easier then with less DARTs and more of a clear line, but I do think they could drop the stop in Dún Laoghaire. The trains stop there now so the InterCity won't get too close to a DART in front. Bray is by far the biggest town on the line and a natural interchange point with the DART and the numerous bus services served at the station so I could never see them skipping there. Anyway, it'll all be mute when the DART is extended to Wicklow Town.

that's right, the rail census due to only being done 1 day per year is unfortunately not a reliable metric of usage, and it is generally done at a low usage point of the year which the argument for that is that it is an average day on the railway (which) in reality there is no such thing due to so many variables.

to be reliable it needs to be done every day but that is unlikely unfortunately, which is a problem because unless that is done then it can only ever reflect the day on which it is done.

yes but realistically there is no typical day and there will always be some factors at play whether big or extremely small, that's just the reality of public transport because it's open to all.

it really has to be done every day to get a true metric because trends year on year based on one day each year is never going to be a true reflection of usership which is what we actually need.

i know hense my concerns about reliability.

without doing it every day and getting a true reflection there is a possibility of mistakes being made in terms of actual service provision which can lead to overcrowding/under capacity services ETC.

even with ticket data there is a problem as you have got fare evasion which it's hard to know how low or high that actually is as not every evader will get caught du to only having spot checks.

sensors above the doors could be the best idea here but i can't see it happening.

My understanding based on some FOI requests Ive read through, is the year round data is all there it just may not be as accurate or its scope is more limited as its based on ticket data, leap cards, etc. Whereas the Census data (like goingnowhere says) is a full count made to be as accurate as possible, and is how we end up with such specific numbers even for individual DART services and such.

If someone wanted to they could probably now go to IÉ for an FOI request and get the station numbers for the whole Rosslare line within a week, although I am not sure how detailed it would be. I know its possible to get annual ridership data, but I am not sure if they would also give you weekly or daily data.

Eitherway I am not sure why they don't just publish that raw data honestly, even if it isn't in a nice report like the census is. At the very least the data would be very interesting to see, but imho more importantly it would be a nice bit of transparency from IÉ.

3 extra services added in the last 25 years.. If we continue at that pace we'll all be long gone by the time they put a a frequent direct service on the line!

An hourly/2 hourly shuttle service would be a lot more attractive than the direct service which has gaps up to 5hr 40 minutes between services.

They still haven't managed to add a weekday service that gets to Wexford before midday - madness!

I would argue that it is essential for weekends to be included. My guess would be that many stations are busiest at the weekend (for example, a lot of stations have a very busy Sunday afternoon and evening with people travelling back to Dublin for the working week). If we want to compare how busy stations are then all passengers need to be included.

I should probably have been clearer in my phrasing. I'm not suggesting to discount weekends entirely from the process of measurement and capacity management (this is pretty much the status quo), but rather pointing out that they should be discounted from the pool of days used when determining how much of the year college/school term measurements are relevant, as they're always going to be a different profile.

As you rightly point out, some stations may have very busy services towards cities late on Sundays (as they may have busy services from cities on Friday evenings), but the reality is that few of them are going to be busy during the weekday rush hour, and as such they should be calculated and measured as their own entity/profile. Hence my suggestion of measuring across a week at several different and representative points through the year.