Think you will find both take 18 minutes....

Does anyone believe the final cost would be less than double that?

Infrastructure-wise there is little to stop Irish Rail operating a shuttle service between Heuston and Hazelhatch on the slow lines. Only problem is minimal demand.

Jamie- You are correct. Please accept my apologies. The 18.05 train is now the 18.10 train and should only stop at Adamstown. I took the 18.10 a couple of times after the timetable change and it stopped all along to Hazelhatch...which i then assumed it was the old 18.10.


However the point remains that this train is 5 mins later arriving in the station with no feederbus...meaning a 15 min walk to Celbridge....meaning 20 mins in total.

The demand problem will only get worse as they
1- Increase fares
2- Increase parking charges
3- reduce services both from commuter stations and from Heuston to city centre.

The amount of people that the service (if I can call it that) now suits is reducing by the day. I'm now noticing a number of people who I used to see on the train now on the bus. Its like IR want to kill the commuter train service and only have an intercity service.

is the bus provider the same one as when i used to use this service - albiet in a different direction - all of 11 years ago? In those times there was a lot of hit ans miss with that bus connection (the bus being used also did the school run beforehand which meant that it often never turned up). Its a long miserable walk in the wet from the station to the main street.

As for the "i think you will find" bigade who like to point at timetables as if they were gospel, you ought to know better at this stage.

The DART part of the KRP will not happen for 10 years if not longer. What needs to happen is the next capital expenditure from 2016 I think? is that funding for the 2 bridge replacement and adding the remaining 4 trains into Inchicore to meet with the 3 into Heuston. Until this happens commuter and intercity services will not be able to run efficiency. If the 4 tracks were completed then it would allow two services to depart Heuston at the same time so for example the current 17.20 commuter and 17.25 service to Limerick could depart at 17.25. 2 services can depart Heuston at same time but will stopped at Inchicore where the problem.

Surly the 2 bridges and finishing the tracks won't cost a major amount its only a km or two of track and a little bit of digging. 100 million at most.

That last bit of quad tracking is KRP2 , well documented here http://www.irishrail.ie/index.jsp?p=124&n=191 .

You don't really need to have simultaneous departures from Heuston given the number of services.

The real issue with the KPR is inbound when 2 tracks become 1 and regularly one train or another has to pause. The 0600 from Waterford often paused at Parkwest when it caught the slower 0725 from Kildare in the old timetable. In the new timetable, the slow trains generally give way. But the 1720 outbound is an extreme case when is allotted an extra 10 mins to reach Hazelhatch to enable it triple overtaking....

But even having 3 tracks all the way won't solve all problems if trains have to cross over. Example train on fast track need to reach P2 or 3 and train on slow needs to get to P6-8; in this case one or other will have to pause.