Renmore: close to Bon Secour hosp and ATU
Roscam: loads of housing estates
Recently, GY City Council proposed to re-zone more land at Murrough, and left space for a station in their proposals.
Navan Rail public consultation is live on the Irish Rail website
Initial reading. The route will be 4 new stops:
Dunshaughlin, Kilmessan, Navan Cental and Navan North.
It'll run every 15 mins at peak times and will effectively be an extension of the DART, not an intercity service. Journey time to city centre will be 1 hour. Park and ride at all stations except Navan Central.
Edit: it seems we've waited 2 years for a bit of crayon on map, no real preliminary design at all. Wonder what all the delay was for.
I've posted the details of the route here:
Not ideal. Sounds like they are still planning on continuing with it (they don't really have a choice), but it's going to cause headaches no matter what.
Contract not terminated
The Irish Times piece seems to me to be very badly written. No hint as to what exactly went wrong. I don't know anything more having read it,except that there is a €50m problem somewhere
Does it fully follow the historical route to Navan ?
No, it diverts to better serve Dunshauglin amongst other minor changes.
Looking at the interactive map, it seems roughly 33% of the proposed railway uses the original alignment due to development on the original line and to better serve places like Dunshaughlin.
What is the relationship between ETCS and the IT sustem in the news today?
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0521/1574535-irish-rail-project/
Absolutely zero
I work for a company in Britain who designed and supplies the only operational TMS in Britain, maybe I will get our Sales team to contact Iarnrod Eireann!
Resonate’s luminate is amazing but runs on top of the existing control kit so is a plug in deal
Resonate got its break as Network Rail couldn’t get anyone to meet the traffic management spec they wanted so offered a free trial to anyone willing to take the risk Resonate smashed it and got most of the UK by default.
Irish Rail needs to replace the entire control system and interface so needs a lot more than some fancy software
I did not realise Indra was supplying their DaVinci control system to Iarnrod Eireann as well as TMS
Maybe IR need Scalable, Luminate & Initiate - anyway I digress…
Is the issue that Indra fecked up the implementation of the system they are supplying or is the issue that the existing IR network too fecked up to integrate any management system?
Yeah, I wouldn't be throwing Indra under the bus until there's a post mortem on the entire thing. Irish Rail, while not the incompetent bogey man many would have you believe, are also not a paragon of competence. Entirely possible that Indra couldn't make headway because the specs/scope were wrong, etc.
There is a culture change issue in Irish Rail of moving to train graphs and modern operational principles
Indra has shown that the current timetable just doesn’t work and can never work
First thing the TMS does each morning is to simulate the days timetable and to identify conflicts and then tries to reschedule to get it to work
Agreed, the biggest impediment to using TMS is cultural, I have seen that in Edinburgh IECC and WSSC control where TMS is overlayed on the 9 workstations that control the railway
Indra is really bogged down with the interlocking interfacing. While the post 1995 stuff is all SSI/CBI so speaks the same language there are some very non European kit like the 1976 Clonsilla setup, the southside DART and a good chunk of Dublin Cork all still using legacy US designed relay locking. Add in the secret sauce code which does the level crossing scheduling on the DART (as recently as 15 years ago, the original 1984 code was still in use for this)
Given that 'the other' option aka Scalable IECC has the same issue.
They should really have made Iarnrod Eireann make all interlocking interfaces standard. I know we replicate relay interlocking config to interface to Scalable and standard interface to TDM (as an example). You cannot start bespoking your interfaces as that is a recipe for complication and failure.
Edit: one of the consequences of Iarnrod Eireanns dash to different suppliers across the decades and world is the proprietary system or interface.
Can the DART one of 8500 type not operate with just one pantograph per unit?
Noticed a 4 car with two up. Could be completely normal but not something most EMU usually need.
The 8500s have two power cars, so each has its own pantograph. The driving trailers are unpowered.
Needs both up
The new DART+ sets can run on a single pantograph as its a single train electrically. The second pantograph is used during charging. That said the Schunk pan head on the new DART+ fleet is huge compared to Brechnell Wills metro pantograph used until now.
On the topic of intercity rail services and passenger comfort (in particular versus competing bus services), I have wondered why IE continue with a carriage configuration that has seating at tables to the extent that it has. I would say that part of the reason IC travel isn't as relaxing as it could be is because passengers are seated in groups of four, facing each other and encouraged to interact (sometimes with fellow passengers who are strangers to one another). The reality is that IC travel in this country rarely exceeds 3h so is there really a need for tables? Can we fit more seats on each carriage if it was more of an airplane/coach configuration where everyone is just facing forward? People would certainly talk less. I was recently in Malaysia where their IC service consists of carriages where tabled seating was the exception and it made for a far quieter and more comfortable journey.
Yes I agree. While some tables would be good, I think most people would prefer airline type seating these days. In Japan the seats in the bullet trains and some other services actually rotate 180. The cleaning staff rotate them between runs so that they always point forward of the direction of travel. I find it uncomfortable to travel backwards and it is another bonus of coach travel.
I like the four top tables myself, so I can work at a laptop. Never really had any issue with interactions with people, even though I prefer not to talk to people while travelling.
I do love the single seat option on the Enterprise sets though. 🤣
The Mark 3s were originally configured with airline seating. It was very unpopular and they were then reconfigured with the 2+2 around a table setup. While that was a long time ago, I’d say the ghost still haunts.
Mk3 always had table seats, the ratio was changed early on
much prefer the airline style. Table is a total waste of space and frankly weird sometimes
