Why Are Irish Rail Failing so badly

I think part of the problem is that CIE does not seem to recognise that it has problems with management structures, management style, work practices, customer service, customer-centric-focus and management-employee relations.

The Government gave it a shed load of money to invest in new trains, stations, new busses, signals etc and CIE then tends to try and present this physical infrastructure upgrade as if it were proof that the company has reformed.

All I can see is the same old same old from CIE just in shinier newer trains and busses. They are down to direct funding for capital infrastructure, not down to the company's performance or reforms.

When the gloss wears off the new fleets, we will be back to the same old dysfunctional organisation and an aging, badly maintained fleet.

I think at this state, the way forward is probably going to have to be something like the RPA + Luas franchise solution for most if not all of CIE with PSO funding allocated by the Dept of Transport for non-profitable services that have a social need.

I think we need to just accept that the giant transit authority model simply does not seem to work. I know it occasionally works out well in some rare cases, but if you look around Europe, there are plenty of similar companies that also provide horrendously bad customer service in many areas.

Take a look at the SNCF. It has its flag ship TGV service which gets all the recognition, but its also got really bad customer service and on many non-TGV routes, some very grotty trains.

The original UK model of privatisation is definitely not one to follow, but I think there are definitely better models out there that might lead to a more efficient transit network.

At the end of the day, we have to look at this from the national perspective.
Our transit system needs to be providing us with the best service and the best value for money. It's a waste of very limited resources (which we are borrowing at the moment) if we have to unnecessarily subsidise areas of transit systems that should be running more efficiently, or if we are paying over the top money for staff and pensions or decisions resulting from poor organisational systems / dysfunctional decision making systems.

Waste of resources also means that we are unnecessarily curtailing routes that should be viable and that has a social and economic impact.

Also, having poor quality services or unnecessarily poor frequencies in general has an economic and social impact.

An efficient, successful public transit system would have more job-creation impact in terms of actually making it cheaper, and easier to get to/from work and to/from shops and impacting upon the real economy than bloating a large semi-state company to keep people employed in jobs that may not even be needed.

It's a transit system, not a job-creation project.

Also, in this day and age, we have social welfare supports and training systems and all sorts of other measures. In the past there was an element of direct creation of jobs through semi-state bodies and the civil service rather than trying to get people into jobs that actually existed.

It's a problem that is seen in many countries that had an inadequate social welfare and employment support system, particularly in southern Europe i.e. semi-state bodies were used as job-creation tools rather than dealing with real social and labour market issues head-on.

Ireland moved from being a Spain/Italy like setup where you had poor labour market flexibility coupled with poor social welfare and educational/training support and a lot of state-ownership and intervention in job-creation. To a situation where we have at least a medium-level social welfare system, good support and educational back-up for moving between jobs/careers and a very flexible labour system.

Unfortunately, I think CIE is definitely a relic of another era entirely.

Because the Dutch system is probably organised properly and would have local authority involvement in figuring out how to best use it to get services to any given area and would tend to be very end-user focused i.e. actually providing a service.

Also, in general the Dutch system has the advantage of a large and very dense population so, comparisons with Ireland sort of become a bit difficult once you get outside the Dublin City (not even the extended suburban) area.

But, there are still a lot of good points from the Dutch system that could be applied here without difficulty.

Seamless integration of services needs things like common ticket systems, and route management being done as a transit system rather than as a railway company, bus company etc.

Which stations on the outskirts of towns? Mountrath possibly (it's closed) and Charleville but in most cases the stations are reasonably well located. Portlaoise and Thurles in particular - see below.





There should be a CIE link (or a private operator involved) from Thurles Station to Cashel (the Rock) at least once daily and heavily marketed. I note that the Shamrock Bus Company http://www.shamrockbuses.com/ which operates a Thurles/Clonmel service no longer starts from the railway station at Thurles -there's co-ordination for you. I wonder how many passengers IE carries to the Rock of Cashel annually - probably a nice round figure? Of course, if ever a line cried out for reopening it would be the 4.5 mile branch from Goold's Cross to Cashel.

foggy_lad wrote: »

(T)rain stations should be central just like most bus stations in towns, but in Ireland, that is not the case. Edgeworthstown, Newbridge, Athlone, Ballinasloe, Ballybrophy, Carrick-on-Suir, Charl(e)ville, Cloughjordan, Collooney, Cork Kent station, Drogheda, Dundalk, just for starters! Any more than 5-8 minutes walk from the respective town centres is too far

Going on about this again?

Why don't we bulldoze motorways through the centres of towns as well? It'd take twice as much effort, but it's the same thing as trying to put a railway right through the centre of an existing town, and that's before concerns about steep gradients, excessive curves to reach a certain point in town, et al. You've also got the NIMBY factor, which was alive in the past as well. Before there were cars, people did ride to the train station, either on equine-back or in carriages hauled by such beasts. (Or went on bicycle.)

Funny how you didn't weep so strongly about the far-flung train stations along Dublin suburbs (e.g. Clondalkin, Portmarnock, Leixlip Louisa Bridge, Killiney, Lusk/Rush station in Effelstown, etc.). And as for "five to eight minutes' walk" to/from a train station: Back when I used to walk to Louisa Bridge station when it was reopened for commuter service, the walk was 15 minutes from my house, which was near the Celbridge Road in Leixlip. Since there was no route 66B back then (although there was alternate route 66 service during the rush hours to the Irish [later International] Meat Packers plant where Hewlett-Packard stands now, and this was not properly outlined in the timetable at any time), the nearest bus stop to catch the 66 (or any provincial bus) was over ten minutes away (Calvin's Cross, before they put in a city-bound bus stop by the church). How is it that people have gotten so lazy within two decades?

Edit: Not even all bus stations are within the centre of towns. Never heard of park/ride bus stations, which are often quite far from the centre of town (further than many train stations) and adjacent to motorways in order to make the journey faster (in theory)? Gotta drive to those.