New Belfast & Northern Line timetables

[berneyarms]

Revised timetable PDFs for the Enterprise, Northern line and DART are now online, effective 10th April 2016:

Enterprise:
http://www.irishrail.ie/media/dublin-belfast-web.pdf

Northern Line:
http://www.irishrail.ie/media/dublin-dundalk-_current_-_2015.pdf

DART:
http://www.irishrail.ie/media/dart_commuter_-_web.pdf

Per IE the most significant changes are:

Belfast Enterprise:
06.50hrs Belfast Central to Dublin Connolly to be advanced to 06.45hrs
09.35hrs Dublin Connolly to Belfast Central to be advanced to 09.30hrs
11.00hrs Dublin Connolly to Belfast Central to be deferred to 11.20hrs
19.00hrs Dublin Connolly to Belfast Central to be advanced to 18.50hrs
21.15hrs Belfast Central to Dublin Connolly to be advanced to 20.05hrs

Dundalk Commuter:
09.35hrs Dundalk to Dublin Pearse to be deferred to 09.40hrs
10.57hrs Dublin Pearse to Dundalk to be deferred to 11.10hrs
12.40hrs Dundalk to Dublin Pearse to be deferred to 12.50hrs

[berneyarms]

The point is that these changes were not advertised (other than some midnight hour changes to the journey planner).

As things stand several of the Enterprise schedules are mere fantasy and impossible to deliver but obviously any old nonsense suffices !

Appreciate the PDFs - when did the commuter version become available ?

Which of the Enterprise schedules are impossible?

[Inniskeen]

0645, 0800, 1035 and 1235 from Belfast, 1850 from Dublin unless preceding trains either run ahead of schedule or have their running amended.

The worst is the 1850 from Dublin which is a complete nonsense and will reach Drogheda and Dundalk at exactly the same time as the current 1900. The latter is rarely on time due to a combination of the chronic late running of preceding services and congestion at Drogheda caused largely by an out of service train occupying one of the three platforms for almost an hour and a half.

The obvious time for the 1850 is 1905 but then I suppose anything goes under the current "nobody cares about journey time" philosophy and sure the customer should be grateful for what they get and stop whinging !

Irish Rail seem determined to make the northern line beyond Malahide ever less relevant to it's customers. Fortunately we now have the M1 to which the railway offers little or no competition. As long as DART takes more capacity than the service merits, the northern line will carry only a fraction of the journeys which a competitive service would deliver.