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Unread 06-09-2016, 00:16   #20
Inniskeen
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by berneyarms View Post
Again there is a balance to be struck here - the need to maintain a relatively intense commuter service from Maynooth & M3 Parkway and to fit the Intercity service in, all on a two track railway.

What you seem to want would need extra track and I can't see where you'd possibly fit that in on the Maynooth line. It's all well and good saying journey times on longer distance services have extended on the Connolly side, but so has the number of local commuter/DART services to try and meet the needs of Dublin residents, and trying to fit both on a two track railway and still please everyone is the art of the impossible in my view.
Yes, of course there has to be a balance and a good case can be made for affording some priority to slower moving commuter trains on constrained infrastructure at peak periods. Nonetheless in many instances Irish Rail seem to have a slowest train first policy almost for the sake of it and seem to think that customers don't care about journey time. This approach is likely to prove unsustainable and means that the rail corridors around Dublin will never achieve their potential due to the indifferent quality of the service delivered.

Incidentally DART frequency has increased little since the service was introduced, the trains have just gotten slower and slower creating ever more congestion and degraded scheduling. The extension of DART to Malahide has been a disaster operationally as the layout at Malahide is totally unsuitable for the service pattern while the Bray/Greystones line is not capable of reliably supporting the half hourly service.

There is little case to be made for the proposed ten minute interval DART service at off peak periods given the significant further downgrading of other services, the relatively modest levels of demand and the ease with which additional capacity can be added by increasing train sizes.

On the Maynooth line, it should be very easy to separate Sligo trains
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