The Great Irish Train Robbery
Contrary to popular belief, this is not something that happened in 1976. It is an ongoing phenomenon that Irish Rail users put up with every single day.
Commuters are a badly treated group of people, especially in the Dublin outer suburbs, because there is no alternative and they know it. Yes, you could drive into Dublin, but where the to park? And that isn’t all you have to consider, because you also have the associated costs of being stuck in traffic for a couple of hours a day. Petrol is the obvious monetary issue, especially with the rising cost of fuel at the minute. However, in this environmentally conscious age that we live in, you also have to take into account the pollution costs of thousands of drivers sitting in gridlocked traffic.
Which brings us back conveniently to the plight of commuters (it actually didn’t but there you go…). The majority of outer suburban commuters travel by train to Dublin. One example is the Arrow service that runs from Kildare to Dublin’s Heuston station. On this service, there are just under 15,000 passengers each way every day. This is not an insignificant number of people. And yet they are treated as third class passengers.
Third class?
Irish Rail breaks its mainline trains into two classes - premier and standard. However Irish Rail places the concerns of the infrequent mainline train users far above the commuters. At the time of writing a standard fare from Cork to Dublin is 33euro. That means a good bit of revenue for Irish Rail as at the weekend these trains are almost always packed full of people. However, the weekly cost of travelling from Sallins, one of the stations on the Kildare Commuter line to the city centre is 35.70. That doesn’t sound too bad until you multiply it by 50…
And people pay it. They have no choice. irish Rail take 1785euro a year from most of the rail users in sallins. Definitely not an insignificant amount of money. And that’s just one station on the line. Sallins, Newbridge and Kildare pay the highest per mile rate anywhere in the country. So you’d think that with commuters with this amount of financial backing, they would get some preferential treatment when it comes to trains and timetables, etc.
No, commuter trains regularly get shunted into sidings on the lines so that delayed or special trains can bypass the commuter trains. the below example shows this quite clearly.
On the day of a match between Dublin and Tyrone last year, the train was understandably very busy. There are a lot of Dublin fans who live in Kildare now so they have to travel up for the matches. It was also a small commuter train so a very large number of people were standing by the time the train left the station, on time. Then, half way between Sallins and Celbridge, the next station, the train moves off the main line and onto a siding. With the overcrowding on the train it got very hot on board. Then a mainline train goes past and most of us expect to be moving quite soon. However, after another delay another mainline train goes past. The train was unbearable at this stage with the heat and crying children, however, the train moved off then to arrive in Celbridge shortly afterwards with about 100 people who aren’t goin to be able to get on to the train.
On a busy match day, they gave priority to mainline trains rather than the commuters. And this isn’t an isolated incident.
Time for change in Irish Rail
It should be time for change. And fortunately (for users as far as Celbridge at least.) the government has stepped in to fund the expansion of the Kildare route to include a 4 track service to Celbridge. This should at least alleviate some of the issues as long as these lines are properly prioritised and commuters don’t get a raw deal again.
But what happens to those serviced by other routes? Do they have to continue to put up with being considered a third class passenger?
