Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

Yeah, even the route is only “similar”. From Collins Avenue south, they take different paths: Metro North landed on the other side of Stephen’s Green, and didn’t have any interchange with DART (MetroLink has two: at Glasnevin and Tara St).

For anyone who likes Spot-The-Difference games, here’s MetroLink (Top) and Metro North (Bottom)

MetroLink is a better project - the DART station interchanges alone make it better, even before you look at cost and capacity.

O’Connell Bridge and Parnell Square were removed from the plan before the Railway Order submission, and replaced with a single station midway along O’Connell Street, so Metro North didn’t even have that bonus. The Glasnevin interchange apparently never occured to the designers, and so Drumcondra station was chosen as the rail interchange instead. The southern entrance of O’Connell Bridge would have been about 250 metres from Tara Street, which would have been acceptable as an interchange, but then they pulled that station from the design.

Actually, the O’Connell Bridge station wasn’t actually under the Liffey. The main station box would have been excavated on O’Connell Street the north bank of the river, and a pedestrian tunnel would have connected this to a smaller ticket hall and entrance on the south bank. Here’s the northern side:

(This drawing is reproduced among of a set of concept drawings from 2009, here: Dublin Metro North – Line-wide components – JvS Industrial Design (stedingk-design.com)

Note “Paid” and “Unpaid” on that drawing; Unlike Luas, Metro North was envisaged as a ticket-controlled system. MetroLink, like Luas, will be on an honour system: there are no turnstiles. It’s one of the many changes made to reduce the overall cost of the system, both in terms of construction and operation costs.

You'd have to think he's trolling us! Now he's dead right, delivery is painfully slow but I think the delays caused by the whole planning and objection stage of the projects is lost on him.

ps. apologies for linking to article behind a paywall.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/08/28/why-is-our-capacity-to-deliver-infrastructure-projects-worse-now-than-it-was-in-the-19th-century/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0Pu4LDE5uA3j9LSqRi6snzSS46FVZWPU2Yejc5vH_9l4OAfCvwfYvTliM_aem_sr96_0Pfs2UZ5b3p7iSz3Q

Is this the same Michael McDowell that was Tánaiste?

Some news on this from the weekend:
https://www.independent.ie/business/worlds-biggest-developers-eye-bids-for-dublin-metrolink-contracts/a66992698.html

Some of the biggest infra firms in the world and lining up to make a bid for the contract.

Also, the second round of public hearings is underway.

As someone who is a skeptic by nature, I'm starting to believe that this project will actually happen. (I think the route through swords is rubbish though)

Yes. This was a concern I had with DU and MN: apart from the need to destroy and rebuild half of St Stephen’s Green (including the lake!), I worried that together, both projects created a de-facto “Dublin Central” station in a space that was never going to be big enough to allow expansion to accommodate the passenger numbers that this would generate. I suppose the lack of a proper DART interconnection anywhere else along MN meant that they had to link up with DU at Stephen’s Green, but it would be better, if DU ever goes ahead, to not make it such a passenger magnet.

Granted, my fears were worse back when DU was simply called the “Dublin Interconnector”, with the implication that it would carry mainline services as well as DART: that would have been a nightmare. I think the idea of mainline trains on this link was a hangover from the original Dublin rail plan in which this central station was to be built at the Temple Bar bus depot: a location that had ample space to become a main train station back in the 1980s.

It's so funny to me how the original stephen's green station is now being panned as 'too central'

We cancelled Metro North, we cancelled DART expansion in the late 1980s, we cancelled the underground at Temple Bar.

For each of those cases, the parties doing the cancellation wanted those projects to proceed, but there was no way we could have afforded to continue with them. That’s not the same as some politician deciding that, for example, Luas is a bad idea and canning it.

Won't stop a future government cancelling another project because we can't afford it/it isn't correct/the last government made the plan/whatever.

Infrastructure plans will be changed, that is one of the bad things about Irish democracy.

When is a realistic start date for construction of this? For most of the population who don't follow this and long gave up on this as a pipedream in a country clearly incapable of delivering major projects in most people's lifetimes, like myself, it really is depressing. The planning system in this country needs to be completely overhauled and, frankly, made a lot less "democratic". It's appalling.

What's even more appalling is the government so obviously using that broken system to avoid doing anything and delaying.