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Unread 30-07-2013, 11:02   #44
Thomas J Stamp
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: The Home of Hurling
Posts: 2,708
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Originally Posted by iknowwhereiamgoing View Post
From your comment I presume that you wish that the Irish rail network to be concentrated on a few main lines radiating from Dublin to major cities and a few commuter lines serving those cities. I suppose you oppose Galway - Athenry - Tuam too? Lines connecting two major cities and indeed lines from cities out to middle sized towns work in the UK and in other major European countries why not in Ireland. E.g. in Devon, Exeter - Barnstaple (only 20,000 pop approx.) a slow 40 mile single track branch line with only one small town and villages and hamlets on route. 12 return trips a day carries 400,000 passengers a year. In other words make the Western Corridor work. If IR cannot do it let another company do so Maybe it is time To have a Network Rail type system to maintain the network including mothballed lines and let other rail perators try to make the system or individual lines work.
I think you are encountering a few basic misunderstandings regarding Rail Users Ireland. We are a passenger operation. We have no problem with individuals operating heritage lines, nor indeed, if it raised money to be ploughed back into passenger operations with IE doing likewise.

With the greatest of respect I also think that you are mixing oranges and lemons by compairing the Irish Railway History with the UK one. You cannot compare Limerick-Galway with Exeter-Barnstiple as in the UK there is a great attachment and usuage (you mention 400,000 usages) with rail but the same is not in anyway as prevelent here.

I have great personal experiance of this as I live in the catchment area of the Nenagh line. Everyone kicks up a big stink about it when rumours go around of it closing - yet nobody uses it. The same is clearly shown in the WRC. Changing companies will not change that. The same is prevelent in all areas of the spectrum. There is no great love affair with rail in this country. There is also a vast difference in population density spead and habiits when you compair rural Ireland and rural UK.

You'd be correct in regards reopening the line to tuam. at a time when IE are on their knees and cannot get their flagship services working properly opening lines to nowhere which will only cost money is craziness. What it would result in is a lot of curtailment of services and closures elsewhere so you may end up with a lot of "heritage" railway in an act of supreme irony.

I, and indeed, RUI as a whole, want to keep rail lines open as much as possible - we have submitted a draft timetable regarding Nenagh Branch to IE as a model shuttle service. Its not rocket science. If we were anti-branch lines we certanly would not have gone to that amount of trouble.

Yet, we opposed the "early morning" train from Limerick to Dublin on the same line, because it was a blatent waste of scent resources and was only done as a political stroke. That is exactly why we, IE, and every independant report opposed the WRC.

So we have a line which attracts a great deal of emotional attachment and desire. Which nobody uses because to the vast majority of them it is not relevent. Meanwhile IE is scrating its head looking at the Enterprise Service and the Cork Service and making as many savings as it can on them whilst trying to keep the show on the road as money is bled onto the WRC. And yet people want Tuam, they want Donegal.....
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