Usual Monday Morning Delays
 

There was the usual Monday morning choas this morning on the Kildare line. Passengers at Hazelhatch were left waiting for 40 mins. No trains ran from 7 20am until 8 am, when eventually a train did turn up, people could not get on to it. What contributed in fact to this was that (selfish) passengers refused to move up the train so that others could not get on.

Those late Monday morning trains
 

This morning the announcement in relation to the late arrival of the 7.22 ex Celbridge to Dublin was made at about 7.35 i.e 13 minutes after the train was due to depart from Celbridge to Hueston!

Part of the Celbridge station tannoy announcement included a comment that the train was 30 minutes departing its journey start.

If somebody in IE was thinking "Customer", passengers could have been informed as they arrived in the station that the train was running 30 minutes late & would then have the option of returning to their cars - I can comfirm that it was cold & foggy standing for thirty minutes on the platform today!

IE, the customers do matter!

At least Dublin Bus had two route 92 busses waiting.

Better than us on the 5:30 from Cork. At least 15 mins late in Portarlington (which was announced when it was already 5 mins late). Made an unscheduled stop in Kildare (no reason given for this) - crawled all the way in (got in 25 mins late).

Announcement on train "Apologies for the slow progress, there's trains ahead of us, they were all delayed becasue of adverse weather conditions".
Bad weather in Ireland?? - we've never had that before :mad:

Into Heuston, people standing at least 5 deep on the Luas platform (4 mins & 11 mins). No 90 for 5 mins and it was totally packed.
One 46A which got packed, then 4 mins later a 92.

Seems normal to me, fog not an issue since all trains have cab signalling. Its just the usual blame something else game since IE once again failed to deal with the leaf fall problem, every line has to be treated every night not the once or twice a week token gesture you get now

2 of the Mk4 sets on Saturday where seriously faster than normal but the fact most Mk4 trains seem to leave late (at least 4 ex Dublin left 10+ minutes late over the weekend) destroys this advantage

Oh I forgot to say that an empty train passed us in Hazelhatch about 8am it stopped at a red light just after the station and then went on its merry way into Hueston.

A suggestion for the automatic PA:

"Iaranrod Eireann regrets the indefinate suspension of all services on the Cork-Dublin line. This is due to a leaf which has been detected 4 miles south of Kildare. A team of engineers are making their way on foot from inchicore with a leafblower to clear the line. We regret any inconviencience caused"

The 5:30 never seems to arrive in Port on time anymore. Its almost got to the stage that you can be 5 or 10 mins late and be pretty sure that its not going to have passed through. I'm going for the 7:52 and lately I find that I'm always on the express train.That train most be running very late these days considering it is not only behind the Cork train but also the Waterford train.

Even the out of Heuston trains decided to take on a bit of a delay.

The 07:10 to Galway left at 7:30 with the last two carriages empty due to sub-zero temperatures. At ten past there was a staff announcement to "send the shunter to platform 7." At half seven in the few carriages which did have a working PA system we were told that there was a technical problem with the doors.

What does a shunter do?

Isn't a shunter the guy who gives the train a push start? He's the well built guy you'll see around ;)

I was up in sweden/denmark last week and got an overnight train from copenhagen to stockholm on wednesday.

Unfortunately Wednesday night saw Swedens first bad snow of the winter so I expected delays.
To my surprise I arrived into Stockholm central 5 mins nearly despite a foot of snow in some places.

Considering the difficulty of this journey to say that IE cant deal with leaves on the track is a pathetic joke.

On a different note my train tickets around scandinavia cost me €320 when bought in sweden on the day of travel (they seem to work on the basis that the closer to departure time the more expensive the ticket will be).

IE offered me the same journeys for €627 over a month ago when the price quoted at the time by swedish rail was €210. IE are a rip off