Livery on 29K trains

[sublimity]

Does anyone know if the rest of the 29K carriages will be repainted in the dark green colours like some of them already have? Personally, I think it’s pure laziness from Irish Rail when they link the old livery with the new livery to make an eight carriage commuter train. It’s not easy on the eye and it looks unprofessional in my opinion. Sort it out Irish Rail.

[ACustomer]

I presume that the rostering of sets involves splitting 8 car into 2x4-car formations at some point in the day, and re-combining 4-car into 8-car formations at a later stage, possibly in a different location. Also individual 4-car units may have different maintenance schedules or may develop faults, which involve swapping some units.

So I'm fairly sure it's more complicated than you seem to think. The last thing on the minds of IE personnel must be the matching of liveries. There are time when IE needs a break!

[Mark Gleeson]

Paint scheme doesn't make the trains run on time.

The fleet is slowly being repainted as required, capacity requirements mean it is not possible to take units out of service en mass for repainting. If Irish Rail did this we would immediately call foul.

[Jamie2k9]

I think there is only one (could be two) 8 pace with split livery. The rest are singles or matching. I'd say its rare a 29 is split these days unless there is a failure/operational change.

They have no need to split based on schedule from what I can tell.

[James Howard]

I agree that it is a bit trivial to be concerned about split livery. However, some of the 29Ks with the old livery are in quite a decrepit state by now.

That being said, it must be at least 5 years since the new livery came in which leads to the question - why start on a new livery programme in the first place if it's ended up taking so long to get even half way through it? In the end, it actually does look unprofessional to be mixing and matching this way which is typical of the little details that Irish Rail get wrong. They seem to have a history of making a complete mess of branding - they are on their third corporate identity in a little over 20 years and there are bits of all three on display in every station in country.

But as Mark said, nobody cares about the branding - they'd just like the trains to run on time. For bonus points, maybe get the average speed between Mullingar and Dublin over 60kph. Then start worrying about branding. Or better still, leave it alone so that we can end up with everything consistent by default about 20 years from now.

[James Shields]

I got the impression they got through painting a good portion of the 29K fleet fairly quickly, then it seemed to grind to a halt. I suspect the project ran out of money.

In general, train coaches need a repaint around every ten years as part of their general upkeep. The 29Ks are between 14 and 17 years old, so it's possible some had been repainted in the old livery, and won't need another repaint for a few years. Having said some of them look pretty rough, in fact some of the repainted ones could really use a bit of a touch-up.

I agree it has nothing to do with running trains on time. As the bodywork is mostly aluminium these days, I'm not sure painting them is even necessary, as it would be for steel bodies.

[Mark Gleeson]

There is a bigger project for the 29k's pending, the floor structure needs to be completely replaced.

Its not a case of money, its a case of need and the fleet is needed in service

Its only if there is a major incident or a very bad graffiti attack will a repaint be done

[James Shields]

Any chance that when they replace the floors, they'll improve the noise insulation?

[dowlingm]

Originally Posted by Mark Gleeson

There is a bigger project for the 29k's pending, the floor structure needs to be completely replaced.

Its not a case of money, its a case of need and the fleet is needed in service

wouldn’t be so urgently needed if the 2700s were serviceable, the idea of acquiring UK stock hadn’t been a dead end, and meanwhile the announced 41 22K middle units are still years from delivery...

[James Shields]

If there's one thing to learn from the 2700s (and the 8200s), it's that buying a small stock of 10-12 coaches to bolster an existing fleet is a false economy.

Edit: Just realised that the 2700 fleet was 26 coaches, which is bigger than the 2600 fleet (17 coaches) or the 2800 fleet (10 coaches), so fleet size wasn't really the problem. However I think if one manufacturer had been used for all DMUs in the 1994-2000 period, it would have been a lot more viable to treat them as one class for servicing.

[ACustomer]

2800 fleet (10 coaches)

The 2800 fleet is 10 2-car units, or 20 coaches.