£500 million sounds a bit mad given the passenger numbers involved and the distance between the two cities.
Even a fleet of those 22000 new intercity DMUs that Irish Rail bought would bring that service up to an acceptable level that was able to compete with the motorway.
If it's frequent, has sufficient capacity and a reasonable level of on-board comfort it will always be popular.
As it stands it's too unreliable and infrequent to make a serious impact.
On a route that short whether you're going at 100 mph or 125 mph isn't going to make a whole lot of difference. The major issue is removing the bottle necks on the line and coming up with a solution that allows the enterprise to come into Dublin without being snarled up in slow moving DART / Commuter traffic.
That could just be the use of more intelligent and better implemented signalling and passing loops.
Last edited by MrX : 03-04-2008 at 11:42.
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