Figures/messing around with timetables
 

on the week ending the 16th March there were 17 individual passengers on the branch line for the 5.05 am ex-limerick service.

yesterday I counted 7 passengers including myself abord departing Roscrea.

Again, yet again, the train was late, 10 mins, departing Roscrea. We skipped Monesterevin and still arrived late, getting into Heuston at 8.47.

I'll be on it again soon. But those are the figures, and skipping stations to try and get in on time isnt on.

on the way back, four brave souls on the 19.15, which was held up for the 19.20 from cork, which was itself late at 19.25. Spot the problem? That 19.15 isnt, obviously, supposed to link with the cork train. Of course, nobody transferred.

so, an unscheduled and unadvertised conenction? For what reason, surely not political.

anyway, I'll miss the 2700's they are warm if nothing else. Lonely, though.

That delay yesterday managed to make the following Cork, Limerick (via Thurles), Galway and Westport trains late.

Someone really needs to get a grip on it.

sorry to bring this up again but has anyone confirmed what IE are up to on the Saturdays of the closures, i.e. since the 1705 ex Limerick is a bus are they shunting ex Dublin to the Branch to do the 1915 ex Ballyb?

{I only ask on the grounds that it shows once again IE can do all sorts of things when they can be @rsed}

presumably so, in fact its not that big a diversion to run a bus from the 1800 along the route portlaoise/borris-in-ossory/rathdowney/templemore/thurles it will pass ballybrophy station that way.

E10 single from dublin to any of the nenagh line stations!! or visa versa

how random. if i didnt know you were a real person i would have thought that came from a spam bot.

can you enlighten me?

its not on the IE wesbite, you cannot book online.

its not advertised in Roscrea Station, day return fare on monday, inclding LUAS/Bus, was €27.70.

over to you.

you can book online from nenagh somehow on the website ! - search Dublin heuston to any Nenagh line station :10 euro!:) it is advertised on Tipp FM

I tried booking Dublin-Nenagh for April 25: all single fares were €10. This included at least 2 journeys via Limerick. If you try to book Dublin-Limerick on the same day, the Dublin-Limerick Journey is €20 or €30 (approx).

This is madness. Ordained by Alan Kelly?

Having gone through the online booking process Nenagh - Dublin is bookable online for €10. The system would have allowed me to book for tomorrow morning's early bird through train and collect my ticket at Nenagh station. On the face of it it seems to suggest a ticket vending machine has been installed. A more likely scenario is that the station booking office has those A4 ticket sheets which were widespread two or three years ago so that they can pop a sheet in the printer and print off the ticket. Then it's just a matter of pressing the perforations to get the ticket from the sheet. If this is indeed the case for Nenagh ticketing it should be possible to do likewise from Roscrea.

In the reverse direction it is possible to book Heuston to any Nenagh line station for a tenner.

So €22/€23 return (including mandatory transaction fee of €2 plus possible extra €1 fee depending on card type used).

All very well this being available but would suggest the group make appropriate representation to IÉ and insist on the promotion being put on the website and Facebook etc...Tipp FM will tell customers originating along the line but the hypothetical Aunty Mary in Dublin thinking of taking a trip down to the in-laws or the casual Dublin-based day tripper is unlikely to know of it. A few posters should be put up around Heuston advertising this fare. Hope this will be of help.

PS: 25% off online bookings until midnight tonight.
Use the following code FB1350 (Source IÉ Facebook page). (Had a scout around the forum but this doesn't seem to have been mentioned already).

Only saw it a few minutes ago.

Given the numbers there really isn't anything which is going to make a change sufficient to drum up business.

For legal reasons we cannot speculate as to how this came about but clearly a higher power is pulling strings.

The 10 euro via Limerick will be knocked off the system ASAP

check out the attachments I just took snaps off from the IE website.

spot the difference?

this offer may exist, but it is very difficult to find. :eek:

I think that is down to being able to collect your tickets in Dublin.

It shouldn't really make a difference though.

On Monday I travelled Cork-Dublin, but I collected my ticket in Wexford on Friday evening (long story).

That's what the dropdown where you select which station to collect from deals with. After all, it doesn't make a difference to where you actually pick it up from. I'd said I was picking up that Monday ticket in Cork.

The system will not let you book if the station you are starting from lacks ticket collection facilities which is completely logical and avoids all manor of potential problems

The drop down list is the list of all possible collection locations, you can collect at any station with a ticket machine regardless of your initial choice

It would seem more sensible to pop up a warning that tickets can't be collected from the source station. That way anyone who wanted to book a ticket from Roscrea but who was able to pick up in Dublin, Limerick etc. wouldn't be excluded.

Thats fine, but people don't read the instructions and then you have a problem.

All well and good later saying but the website told you that, its far better avoid the problem in the first place.

For the majority collecting somewhere else is not practical, and even suggesting it is not going to go down well

How about the ticket checker gets both tickets printed out at Limerick before he leaves and people can collect the ticket on the train. :)

this is all very well, but the reality is that if i hadnt thought of looking messing about with the website, and just looked for a plain old return from roscrea (picture one) i owuld not know about the 10 euro fares.

also, say i decide i want to collect my €10 ticket from roscrea to heuston, the only place i can do that is heuston. Do you honestly think the ticket collector on board will buy that, when he is selling tickets? My refusal to take a ticket off him is an offence and so i get the penalty fine. Even if i can convince him, i still when getting to heuston have to do the same trick at the ticket barrier, then presumably have to print and produce the ticket to whoever i convince to allow me through.

all at 8.45 when i will have been presumably been delayed by the train and then further delayed trying to sort out this mess.

Thats the reality. To quote Napoleon at waterloo when seeing the prussians, as far as i am concerned this promotion may as well be on the moon.

I'm with Colm on this one. In all seriousness actually. Bit of blue-sky thinking is needed.

ha ha ha

i'm off to lie down now.

Its fine until

a) Customer doesn't show up
b) Customer tries to collect elsewhere and finds they can't
c) Customer gets different train

The best long term solution is more ticket machines as they can do many things and in time could provide services such as journey planning and booking

The only technical solution would be for the customer to present a leap card to the conductor and that would sync in real time to pull down the ticket, the leap card would then open the barriers in Heuston or elsewhere, work on 747/90 bus as required and so on. Could even use the NFC tech in some phones, avoids going the paper route which is not terribly compatible with the barrier approach being adopted

NFC-on-phone seems to be taking time to roll out. I think 2D barcodes should be explored as an interim measure with the on train ticket seller being able to capture the barcode on an app and be thus authorised to issue a ticket. I saw a facebook status from a mate who lives in London who just took a Heathrow Express and then a Delta flight with no ID except his passport and two 2D barcodes.

What makes me laugh is that this facility (online booking) can be done for Nenagh but Carrick-on-Shannon it's still "no online ticket available"

Barcodes are no good when faced with turnstiles, Dublin Bus and Luas. Irish Rail will be replacing all its booking office and on train ticket equipment in the near future so smartcard support is likely to be in place

What of posting out tickets for stations without facilities? Even if there is a cost of printing / sending added to the ticket price added, it will tend to be cheaper than buying at the station.

exactly - I buy my dublin bus tickets online (at no extra charge) and they always arrive the following morning by post

In a rational world, one of the purposes of having the entity that is CIE would be providing a shared services operation so that BE and IE tickets could be processed and posted by the same people. But Ireland ain't a rational country especially in the semi States!

How about being able to print out online tickets, most other railways and airlines can manage that one.

As Mark G said, it will depend on equipment changes to verify the validity of the ticket.

Wouldn't it be just easier for the people to force Alan Kelly to resign and close this line. As Dowlingm said in another post have that 22k set working Limerick-Limerick junction (possibly on to Waterford) No avoidable delays then.

Irish Rail's operations are littered with avoidable delays largely due to embedded conflicts in the timetable and enogh padding to cushion a falling of an elephant !

As regards the Nenagh service, Irish Rail have made a complete mess of it and I understand have made yet further changes to the the timetable.

There should have been 22ks on the Limerick/Limerick Junction services long ago. There have been sets available after the arrival of the 1525 from Heuston for years.

you cant run it through the ticket barriers.

the reality is that the €10 ticket and return will only work if you are starting from dublin, a point which i guess has been missed by local media/alan kelly inc down here.

there is no need to close the line, as we have long said you can run a nice little shuttle service all day long on it, we even did a timetable for it. it serves its primary function of commuters to and from limerick very well.

as the numbers show, there is pratically zero demand for a service to Dublin from the branch stations. Anyone who actually commutes will, logically, need to be in the city centre at 9am-ish.

They have been using Thurles/Templemore for years, they prabably have a yearly ticket for this year already and will not risk changing over to a service which is well known locally to be a trial one running till probably september. Then they will have to change back again.

Simply speaking, it is a very small number this far out anyway. Apart from occasional business users such as myself, you are really looking at civil/public servants whose core hours are 10am-4pm and therefore dont mind if the train gets in as late as 8.50 on occasion. We estimate that, in reality, you cant be working further beyond the IFSC/Stephens Green areas if you use this train and want to be in on time (using the Luas and 145/90 bus) and that is civil/public sector HQ. You also need to be in a reletivly high position to be able to afford the costs of a monthly/annual ticket (or for your employer to do so). That really narrows down the potential passenger numbers. Of course, had minister Kelly actually done his homework he would have known that.

Then again, maybe he did, and as I have said before, it is a characteristic of north tipperary that people will want this service, will support it very vocally, but will not use it, because it is not relevent to them in any practical way. If you are a local TD here, so long as you are seen to support whatever is vocally and ernestly wanted, you are onto a winner, just ask Michael Lowry.

I don't think that last is a fair statement since the timetable change. The move to 1705 has made the service far less attractive to your usual 9-5 commuter, and it doesn't get in early enough for the 8-4 or 8.30-4.30 commuter. Add to that the level of staffing required to operate the line (including Killonan, which I mistakenly thought was CTC as far as Birdhill), the need to position a set to Nenagh to operate the morning service and the high competition in the morning rush ex Nenagh (JJK dep 0730 arr 0830, BE dep 0745 arr 0835, IE dep 0745 arr 0840) and it gives the appearance of a moneypit.

apologies, what i meant to say was our proposed timetable served the function of providing for commuters very well.

in fact the pre-alan kelly time table did just that too. The evening Alan Kelly Limerick departures only make sense when you consider that they had to provide the connections to the 1705 and 1800 ex-dublin. It just makes a mess of the thing.

Ah, okay :D

I know the numbers were much better before A.K got his hands on the timetable but they have lost these few loyal customers they had with the commuter service. It's a bit too late to restore this as many of these people have probably relocated to Limerick by now or left their jobs. Closure is just around the corner and why the hell are Iarnród Éireann just wasting more money to save it because of a gombeen photograph posing politician. They obviously know that they can not or never will be able to compete with the bus service and motorway. In times when subsidies keep getting cut every budget, they can't afford to keep this line open any more. It is a disgraceful use of tax payers money and the people in the rest of the country need to stand up and say enough. Imagine if this was the Limerick junction-Waterford line it would have closed by now. Luckily numbers on this line are a whole lot better than Nenagh and no thanks to Iarnród Éireann for that as they purposely have it as such a poor service in terms of the arrival/departure times of trains and the time the journey takes.

Waterford-Rosslare closed to obviously move subsidy's to the WRC will Limerick junc-Waterford be next to close to save Nenagh?

Destructix, if I interpret you correctly you think Limerick Junction to Waterford merits retention while Ballybrophy to Limerick should be closed. You suggest that despite Irish Rail, usage on the Waterford line is better than on the Ballybrophy line.

While the overall situation of the Limerick Junction to Waterford line is better than the Ballybrophy line this arises, in part, from the fact that Irish Rail were dragged kicking and screaming into improving the schedules and connections on the line. Nonetheless the sparse service, the lack of through trains between Limerick and Waterford, the minimal commuter options, the lack of a weekend service, low speed, lack of marketing and low quality rolling stock all contribute to underutilisation of an asset on which significant public funds have been spent on track renewal, bridge renewal, level crossing elimination and fencing.

Most of the above factors apply to the Ballybrophy/Limerick line where again any initiatives to improve the service have been forced on Irish Rail. I have no doubt that Ballybrophy to Limerick has the potential to be a successful Intercity route as well as a source of commuter traffic to both Limerick and Dublin. Unfortunately even if there was a will to develope to the line, there isn't the money at present to reverse almost 40 years of neglect and dis-interest and to sort out the idiotic track layout at Ballybrophy and the operating overhead associated with the disproportionally large quantity of level crossings between Birdhill and Killonan.

Inniskeen, my view would be that given the current state of the N24, Limerick Junction-Waterford needs fairly minor upgrades and operational adjustments (such as Sunday service) to not only compete with the bus alternative but to become the no-brainer choice. How much more money will be spent on Nenagh track and structures just to make up the time difference while still leaving Killonan-Nenagh with comparatively high staff costs?

If Limerick Junction-Waterford is reduced to a siding then it will still see some movements to and from Limerick Depot as 2800 home base and wagon maintenance centre. If Nenagh Branch closed the likely impact would be much smaller on non-revenue traffic, and the paucity of use during the Lisduff shutdown indicates to me that it doesn't add much from a redundancy point of view.

Measured in passenger trips I suspect a much higher return for the Limerick area of the track and tamping works would have been a refit to Limerick yard track and upgrading the track toward the Junction to *at least* 70mph all the way but preferably more. That would improve not just Limerick-Dublin and Limerick-Cork but Limerick-Waterford timings too. Instead when you punch in Limerick-Portlaoise to the journey planner not a single Ballybrophy route shows because the services via the Junction routinely overtake.

The Nenagh branch is the wounded, sick old antelope. Let the lions have it so the rest have a chance of getting away.

What irritates me about Waterford/Rosslare, Ballybrophy/Killonan, Limerick Junction/Waterford and other lines is that large amounts of public money was expended on these routes with very minimal return in terms of useful public service. This expenditure continues with relaying north of Nenagh and the upgrading of Richhill AHB.

The dilemma in respect of Ballybrophy/Killonan is that a lot of resource has already been committed but that significantly more will be needed to make the route viable. I have no doubt it could perform on a par with other radial routes but only in the context of reasonably frequent through services to/from Dublin supplemented by appropriate local services at the Limerick end. Clearly bringing the Limerick (via Nenagh) line up to standard is not going to be achieved in the short term but there is nonetheless a case for keeping the line ticking over in some fashion until conditions permit the investment needed to restore the route to viability.

Bit puzzled as to why 2800s would need to travel from Waterford to Limerick for maintenance after the closure of the line between Waterford and Limerick Junction ???

Not sure that spending money on Limerixk yard will yield anything much in terms of service improvement given that the upgrading of Heuston was followed by a reduction in train speeds in the vicinity of the station.

Of course improvements between Limerick and Limerick Junction should take priority, particularly the restoration of the line speed to 80 mph.

the nenagh line will never completly close - ye can all quote me on that.passengers services will be decreased but never gone all together - Iarnrod Eirrean have interest in the line for freight.