Navan Rail Line

Honestly, I think being our second biggest town without a rail connection is more than enough justification for a rail connection.

However, I think you are seriously underestimating the passenger count the Navan line could see. You based your estimate on Greystones numbers, when Drogheda would be a more accurate comparison given the distance and that Navan will likely be a similar size by then. Even then, Navan is already much larger than I think you realise, just over 50% larger than Greystones during the last census.

I also don't think we need to be looking at numbers for other towns to get a good estimate, for that I think we just need to look at the NX's numbers. Last year it carrier 846000 people or an average of 2300 a day, and that doesn't even consider some of other routes passengers could use like the 109 and 109A.

Honestly, I think being our second biggest town without a rail connection is more than enough justification for a rail connection.

We're veering dangerously into rail fetishism here. The purpose of PT spending should be to provide maximum utility to people - I don't care if the mode is rail, bus, bike or donkey and cart. Rail has strengths and weaknesses and we should be leveraging it's strengths not shoehorning it into every proposal where the costs are completely out-of-whack with the benefits.

Picking projects based solely on a towns population size is "lines on the map" thinking. We need to think in terms of how many people a service will help move.

There's underlying snobbery about non-rail public transport in Ireland (buses) which is weird. "It needs to be rail to get people out of their cars" - no it needs to be better (faster, more convenient) than driving.

Drogheda is the opposite of Navan - there exists a functioning rail link already so the costs of providing the service is marginal - so I'm all for it.

Like I said, if this this were a simple line upgrade and could be done for a couple of 100m, then it would be a no-brainer. But you no matter how much you stuff the numbers (and from experience, the mere existence of a rail option does mean everyone will abandon coach/bus services) and even if you manage to convince yourself that 4000 will take the train every day, we are still taking about paying nearly 1m per passenger to switch bus/coach users to rail.

This per-passenger cost is simply not sustainable if we are to have any serious ambitions to improve PT in Ireland. It doesn't scale - if replicated it would mean that spending 100B on public transport infrastructure would only provide services for 2% of the population.

But if Navan is not a good candidate for a railway? Why reopen/build any new railways? Foynes, the western railway should also stop.

I agree - Foynes and the WRC are both wastes of money in terms of emissions or improving public transport. But at least they were/are relatively cheap so it doesn't bother me so much. Rail fetishists are fans of these projects because "all/any new rail is good" - regardless of cost or benefit or if anyone actually uses the service. But let them off - as long as the billions are being spent on properly beneficial stuff, I'm not going to get worked up about 100m here or there on these side projects.

"Why reopen/build any new railways?" - if rail is the appropriate solution to providing a PT option, then go for it. In Ireland this means Cork and Dublin metro (heavy or light), Luas type systems in both (maybe also could work for Limerick and Galway) and eliminating bottlenecks and along the main intercity routes.

The cost of this thing is simply insane. The entire Luas network in Dublin didn't cost this much and immediately improved the lives of people by providing a service that blew all the alternatives out of the water in terms of frequency and speed - hence 50-60m trips per year. We could electrify Belfast to Dublin and Dublin to Cork for this sort of money. It's just a completely bizarre project to prioritize given the huge shopping list of rail improvements we have to make up for nearly a century of underinvestment.

Yep. I'd swap Derry-Portadown with "Belfast to Dublin Electrification and Line improvement" but otherwise this looks like a perfectly reasonable list to me. And I'm guessing you're pretty close to the order you'd get if you were to rank them in terms of cost/benefit.

But the WRC next stage getting the nod harks back to the bad old days when you could jump to the top of the list if you managed to get "your man" into a ministerial position and not based on overall benefits to the country and not based on need - gombeenism. This needs to be stamped out before swallowing billions of euro but also using up the finite pool of engineering/project management talent and construction resources on projects that deliver a fraction of the benefits compared to alternatives.

People have short memories. "Sure we've loads of money, so why bother counting euros?" - the country was awash with cash 18 years ago and full of plans for rail and PT investment before everything went to shite. Back then we were vulnerable to property development taxes falling and now we are vulnerable to a collapse in corporate tax income. If the latter ever goes boom (unlikely but possible), then projects will get cancelled again so it's so it's vital we start with the projects that deliver the most benefits to the most people per euro spent, given how far behind the country is in terms of rail public transport.