Athlone-Mullingar would be:
a) tricky because of the location of Athlone East station and the amount of development in between the two lines to make a connection further east
b) pretty pointless without double tracking most if not all of Mullingar-Maynooth first to get their service level up to a point where it would be worth sending excess service over to Athlone rather than turning it back.
Retrenchment is the name of the game now -maximising passengers carried per euro of capital spend and that really means PaleRail. I'm even starting to wonder if the electrification of Interconnector/Hazelhatch will be followed by dieselising south of Fairview because they won't be able to afford the necessary numbers of EMUs to service the two lines at once and there is no electric only section to worry about.
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