Following no obvious pattern !

In what sense?

In the sense that while there may be 2-car off-peak DARTs running today, the services I saw at lunchtime (1400) were both 4-car sets - hence no obvious pattern to me, at least.

Perhaps there have been some reconfigurations within the plan to cope with the trains that may need bigger sets as Mark suggested, and that certain sets are being retained as 4-car sets rather than splitting?

Notice a lot of Intercity services from next week have had many coaches zeroed out online. Guessing 4 coach sets starting soon. Are any units taken out of service and being changed?

6.35 to Waterford yesterday was a 3 coach and IE claim not one spare 3 coach set available to operate it, the reason for the reduction was "mechanical fault". Better start praying nothing breaks down Friday afternoon, a day when this excuse would be more acceptable given extra capacity on most services.

Well if they have started reconfiguration work, that would mean at least one six piece set and two three piece sets out at a time, so I would imagine that fleet availability will tighten up.

Reduced peaktime DART capacity due to driver issue
 

Reduced peaktime DART capacity due to driver issue
14 October 2013

Some DART services are operating with reduced peaktime capacity today due to a driver issue.

Peak time DARTs normally operate with a mix of 8-carriage, 6-carriage and 4-carriage trains. The effect of this issue will be that most DARTs will operate as a 4-carriage train, and a small number will operate as a 2-carriage train. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.

This is due to a refusal by drivers to carry out a coupler check before DART trains leave the depot to enter service.

This check verifies that an electrical connection is complete through the train when multiple DART units are connected together. This is to ensure that doors are correctly interlocking.

The check is temporary in nature, as a modification is to be carried out to the fleet which will address the issue. Drivers had been carrying out the check since its introduction last month. However, following SIPTU indicating, outside of agreed procedures, that it would no longer cooperate with this check, they are not being carried out by drivers today resulting in shorter trains.

Should this issue remain unresolved, it will continue to affect morning and evening peak DART services.

source: http://www.irishrail.ie/cat_news.jsp?i=4929&p=116&n=237

It is reported elsewhere that there are now three 4 car 22000s in service

Sorry, I'm sure this isn't the right thread for this but am new on here and was wondering if anyone could tell me if there is another thread where a record of delayed trains is kept? For example, my Dart this morning got me to my destination 15 minutes late (it's only a 20 minute journey!) but seems as it technically turned up on time this journey will most likely not make it onto IR's monthly stats as a train that was late.

Just wondering if there's another thread for this sort of thing as I would love to see a comparison between IR's stats and rail user's actual experiences.

Thanks

There are 4000 DART services a month so it is impossible to trace them all, if there is a specific train for a specific date I can get the full trace of the train journey for that trip.

Any DART 5 minutes late is recorded as such at destination (off peak+ evening rush) or city centre if before 9:30am Mon-Fri)

Just thinking any reason why the DVT's on the Mark 4's are not shut down at night time. Is starting them a problem, for a modern train it should be possible to do it. Having 5 running 24/7 must eat a good amount of fuel.