Cross-border review of rail network officially launched

To be clear, Irish Rail didn’t say the PPT couldn’t be used at all; they said it couldn’t be used as a substitute for the DART Underground “interconnector” route. And that is still true.

I remember the arguments for using the PPT, and they were almost all focused on it as a way of connecting Heuston and Connolly, or (from people who didn’t know just how congested Connolly is) of terminating SW intercity trains at Connolly. I don’t remember any loud voices proposing a brand-new DART line using this tunnel as a way to connect Co. Kildare with the Docklands, via a new large-scale DART-Metro interchange station, which is what is being done.

They weren’t lying, they were rebutting what was, at the time, a stupid idea that was floated only to in an attempt to scupper the more ambitious DART Underground project. The statements were trying to protect DART Underground from the same backward penny-pinchers in politics and the media who are still saying that a Luas extension beyond Finglas, or a DART spur, to Dublin Airport would be better than building MetroLink.

It wasn’t up to standard. It still isn’t. DART+ SW has a ton of money being spent to bring it up to standard. Any meaningful passenger use would have required electrification (as it does now): you cannot run regular diesel trains through a small tunnel without endangering the health of passengers, but I don’t remember this being costed into the “just run through the tunnel we have” arguments. So, until the other lines were electrified too, you couldn’t have run any useful service under Phoenix Park: the “simple” fix turns out cost nearly a billion euro, back when the DU option was estimated at 2.5 billion: if it’s an either/or, I know which one I’d have pushed for. And back then, CIE really only got one shot at a big project; thanks to the influence of the PDs, the governments of those days were extremely hostile toward CIE in particular, and rail in general.

Personally, I don’t think the current DART+ SW plan to run through the PPT would have made sense if Glasnevin wasn’t the interchange point with Metro.

Copenhagen is very different, because Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark, not Ireland. I don’t think DSB, the Danish rail operator, was treated with the same kind of distrust and outright hostility that successive Irish governments reserved for CIÉ. (The S-Tog electric rail service was begun in the 1920s - a level of ambition that even the new Free State, with oodles of cheap electricity from Ardnacrusha didn’t show). Yes, we should have been doing all of these things you mention, and DART should have been built on continuously, but for most in Government for most of the 1980s and 1990s, DART was “too expensive”, despite it being a phenomenal success - that in itself was a further complaint: DART was so successful that it required more trains to be brought into service, at even more cost. Our crippling public debt in the 1980s is only part of the reason - there was also no political will to invest in more rail.

Things could have improved when we got money, but in the first boom years of the 1990s, the government was heavily influenced by the individualistic ideology of the PDs which basically said that everyone should just buy a car if they needed to get around Dublin. (There was a brief window of about 3-4 years where road improvements outpaced car ownership, but after that, motoring turned into the ball-ache it is in every other car-dependent culture - yaay neo-conservatism!).

On favouring big-ticket projects, this is because, historically, only big high-profile projects ever got approval from Ministers. If it wasn’t big and shiny, it didn’t get a look in; in fairness, this isn’t only a rail issue: the same affected roads as well - you could get money for a motorway, but not to improve junctions, surfacing and signage on R-roads. Rail, however, has the disadvantage from a PR point of view that a lot of the work that’s needed is invisible to users: new track, points and signalling, or depot capacity: nobody sees that, but without them you can’t expand the network.

No it couldn’t. There is no platform at Drogheda on that line for a start, and secondly there is no spare rolling stock available.

And at the risk of repeating the same point again, northern line trains are beyond full as it is with people being left behind at times.

Adding even more people to that is not going to work until a significant increase in capacity is possible.

There’s two scenarios, and neither of them are good for Drogheda-Navan. Either it generates significantly more passengers, in which case it exacerbates passenger crush-loading closer to Dublin (with impacts on punctuality and reliability), or it has no real effect on passenger numbers, in which case it’s not worth doing in the first place.

The root problem is that there isn’t any more peak-time capacity available into Dublin from the north.