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Unread 26-03-2010, 14:35   #1
sitric
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Join Date: Mar 2010
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Red face Galway <---> Limerick: The slowest train in Europe?

OK - sorry for the provocative title, but it may well be
true. A distance of 70 miles that takes 2 hours. Thats
an average of 35 miles per hour (in old money!).
For comparison, if I was in France, I could travel 265
miles in 2 hours on a train (Paris-Lyon), or put another
way, in 2 hours I could go from Belfast to Cork.

Why is it so slow? The answer it seems is:

1) The trains don't go fast! Another poster on the forum says,
because of the bad track quality, maximum speed is 50 miles/hour.

2) The trains stop _everywhere_, at small towns and villages.
I've never done an exact calculation on this, but my reckoning is
each stop costs 5 minutes in total travel time (.....about
1.5 minutes to slow a heavy train, 2 minutes actual stop, 1.5
minutes to get it back up to speed again).
On the Galway - Limerick line there are 6 stops. So thats 30
minutes just for stops.

The solutions:

Solution to 1):
Well, thats a much bigger political debate, money, etc. Make
the train line better, make the trains better, etc. So thats
a much bigger fight (for another day....)

Solution to 2):
Well, hey presto, the solution to 2) costs nothing: Simply,
run some (not all) non-stop trains between the two cities.
That will shave 30 minutes off the trip (well... 70 miles
distance, for a train at 50 mph - should be travel time of
85 minutes).

For more details (and a longer rant!!) read on!
__________________________________________________ ____________
So, what seems to me to be the best service would be:

1) Frequent "commuter" type trains into/out of the two
cities, at rush hours. I know for a fact many people
who work in Galway city live near athenry/craughwell/ardrahan
even Gort. So run a commuter service (every 20 minutes) from
7am to 9am from Gort in to Galway!
(I guess, at the other end, there are commuters from
Sixmilebridge/Ennis going to Limerick, so do the same there.)

2) Then, intercity services spread throughout the day, half of
them "non stop" and half "stop everywhere". e.g. 3 in each
direction of each type.
(At a limit - maybe the "non-stop" one should stop in Ennis).

What IE does not seem to get on a national basis is what has been
happenning successfully in Europe for years: Trains do not
have to stop everywhere, and moreover they SHOULD not all
stop everywhere. The point is, that by running trains that stop
in small places (and hence providing a _good_ service to the
small numbers of people that live there), you provide a
dis-service to the large numbers of people in the larger (cities),
by having long journeys. This might not be so crucial, if the
trains themselves were electric high-speed, that even by stopping
everywhere, could easily beat the car/bus. But in Ireland, the
train that stops everywhere will never beat the car/bus (at the
moment there are non-stop buses running Galway-Dublin in 2.5
hours, beating the fastest trains 2.9 hours).
And the bottom line is, even with all the other nice aspects of
train travel, if it can't beat fairly significantly the car/bus
(or ....dare I say it... the aeroplane), people won't use it in
numbers.

Lastly.

Of course there will/would be protests from the people who live
in smaller places at trains flying right through their place.
But just, do the numbers:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_popula tion

Galway: 72,000 people
Limerick: 90,000 people
Ennis: 24,000 people.

and all other stops en-route have less than 3,000 people.
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