What's the point in having station staff?

[Dublin13]

They don't do anything?

This morning at clongriffin is great example. Walk past staff onto southbound platform platform display says 35 minutes until next train more and more people pour onto platform wondering why the 7.07 train doesn't show after almost ten minutes it's obvious it's not coming with more and more people pouring onto platform whilst the station staff sit in office saying nothing to anyone no announcements nothing.

Everyone is late for work and Irish rail don't give a damn. They do nothing about fare evasion no information and my ticket spends money on this?

[Inniskeen]

This morning's problem was due to the late running of the 0540 from Bray which was 20 minutes behind schedule at Howth Junction. The return journey started from there at 0709. It would have made more sense to run the outbound train non-stop from Clontarf Road to Malahide to preserve the inbound 0700 although I assume the 0630 from Drogheda catered for the majority of displaced DART passengers in any event.

[Dublin13]

Twitter seems to suggest the excuse is engineering work and the services were delayed by 10-15 minutes, which couldn't be further from the truth. The train was cancelled, apparently it was because of the fact that the train broke down, but good luck getting Irish Rail to admit that.

[Dublin13]

This morning's problem was due to the late running of the 0540 from Bray which was 20 minutes behind schedule at Howth Junction. The return journey started from there at 0709. It would have made more sense to run the outbound train non-stop from Clontarf Road to Malahide to preserve the inbound 0700 although I assume the 0630 from Drogheda catered for the majority of displaced DART passengers in any event.

It's great that you know this, but why are Irish Rail incapable of actually communicating these things with their passengers. Why during times of disruption do they always find something else to blame other than themselves or simply say nothing at all.

Clearly, it wasn't possible to stop the commuter at Clongriffin either and instead far more desirable to leave an hour gap between trains at peak time?Usual contempt for the customer. Of course, just to make it better, make sure that you don't tell anyone what is going on and instead sit in the office at the station without a care in the world.

The Malahide branch is continually treated as a second grade service with the ridiculous overcrowding, awful timekeeping and in general first people to be shafted on the DART network if someone needs to be. The fact they picked to serve people with a service that operated much more frequency between Clontarf and Howth Junction where capacity isn't needed instead decided to cancel a train to leave a gap of one hour and cancel a train that is full of standees says it all.

No doubt the engineering works excuse and the running of the train from Howth Junction means that their figures look better and it doesn't show up as a cancellation since the train actually run. The fact that a load of people were late for work doesn't bother them. Don't worry though, Irish Rail are launching a customer first project sometime soon, I can't help but smile at that revelation, it says all you need to know about the company.

[Inniskeen]

There are overnight engineering works almost every day and I suspect that the disruption was related to these although the operational response and communications left something to be desired.

[Dublin13]

It's something I'm used to, for approx 9 months I used to get the 6:37am and if there was any disruption nobody knew on earth what was going on, either the train would simply not show up on the departure board or it would just stay stuck on 7 mins the whole time (since Clongriffin is 7 mins from Malahide)

You'd go and ask a guy in the ticket office what is going on and he normally had no idea and would turn around and say his job is to sell tickets and nothing more and not be any of the wiser of what was going on till around 7.30am when someone in Irish Rail woke up and answered your tweet that was sent an hour earlier.

The NTA should be forcing them to have proper communication avenues open from departure of first train in the morning and as much as I hate unstaffed stations because of the fact it promotes anti-social behaviour, what is the point of staff there if they just sit there doing nothing.

[James Howard]

It's rare that I'd have much good to say about Irish Rail but I would have to say that the operation of their Twitter account over the last month during the flooding has been excellent. They are responding to a high volume of questions (and a fair degree of abuse) quickly and usefully.

The single best thing Irish Rail could do for communications would be to extend their Twitter coverage to match operational hours. Yeah, I know that not everyone has Twitter, but it's free and if you are a regular commuter, it's not that much of a burden to set up an application that was probably pre-installed on your phone when you got it.

It also has a huge benefit for antisocial behaviour as it is much easier to discreetly tweet Irish Rail than it is to phone the often unmanned emergency number or to contact the driver.

[Dublin13]

The single best thing Irish Rail could do for communications would be to extend their Twitter coverage to match operational hours. Yeah, I know that not everyone has Twitter, but it's free and if you are a regular commuter, it's not that much of a burden to set up an application that was probably pre-installed on your phone when you got it.

Generally their twitter is fine, it's just the fact that before 7.30am it's not a lot of help when nobody is there and it should also not be seen as an alternative to providing adequate information at stations in should be in addition to it.

Some of the operators in the UK are trialling 24 hour twitter accounts.

[James Shields]

Got to agree that Irish Rail make good use of their Twitter account. Also agree they need to extend the hours it's updated.

It would not be a bad idea to put screens in stations displaying the Twitter feed. The blue screens showing arrival/departures could probably be adapted to include this with a software upgrade.

James