hi blahdeblah
i think the lads are being too nice! just a few cynical points to note
according to gmaps the distance saved by a direct route to ardrahan instead of going via athenry is about 8 miles - that represents a saving of just 8 minutes @60mph
the countryside between oranmore and ardrahan (maree, kilcolgan clarinbridge etc) is riddled with one off housing. finding an alignment for a rail line through that is almost impossible. there is also considerable marshland that regularily floods. basically it's not the curragh and building a rail line there would be expensive and every NIMBY on 3/4 acre would drag it through the courts.
the reason that IE, P11 and WOT/WRC focus on exiting tracks/alignments is that the victorians didn't listen to anyone as they cleared out routes for their new fancy fangled railways. that means the hardest bit of the work is done.
the people of galway (of whom i'm one) said goodbye to proper public transport a long time ago by building houses in any field they could find and then putting industrial estates everywhere else. there is no clustering anywhere. this means that any public transport would involve three stages.
1. drive to station (that means huge carparks required)
2. train journey
3. shuttle bus to ind estate (typically miles from railway station)
so it's not just the rail journey time that needs to be competitive -all the other bits need to add up as well to ensure that the door-to-door time of the public transport method beats the door-to-door time of the car alone.
IMO there is no point in building new lines to low density areas (especially for the sake of 8 mins)
that said, maybe there is a point in getting galway coco to define an alignment and preserve it AND begin to build density at ardaun etc. so that when the concept of public transport is proven with the existing lines then the good people of south galway will deserve to have their service upgraded with a direct route.
also you have to remember that much of the use of the ennis-athenry line will be for people getting trains to dublin (as is the case with ennis-limerick). sending them to oranmore will make their journey's longer...
that's my 2 cents. look forward to debating this with you...
actually hang on a sec.
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Simply criticising it's resurrection, rather than lobbying for what's truly needed is just sitting on the sidelines with passive observations - rather than driving the agenda of promoting the needs of the country's rail users (sorry Platform 11).
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that is not cool