26-03-2010, 14:35 | #1 |
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Galway <---> Limerick: The slowest train in Europe?
OK - sorry for the provocative title, but it may well be
true. A distance of 70 miles that takes 2 hours. Thats an average of 35 miles per hour (in old money!). For comparison, if I was in France, I could travel 265 miles in 2 hours on a train (Paris-Lyon), or put another way, in 2 hours I could go from Belfast to Cork. Why is it so slow? The answer it seems is: 1) The trains don't go fast! Another poster on the forum says, because of the bad track quality, maximum speed is 50 miles/hour. 2) The trains stop _everywhere_, at small towns and villages. I've never done an exact calculation on this, but my reckoning is each stop costs 5 minutes in total travel time (.....about 1.5 minutes to slow a heavy train, 2 minutes actual stop, 1.5 minutes to get it back up to speed again). On the Galway - Limerick line there are 6 stops. So thats 30 minutes just for stops. The solutions: Solution to 1): Well, thats a much bigger political debate, money, etc. Make the train line better, make the trains better, etc. So thats a much bigger fight (for another day....) Solution to 2): Well, hey presto, the solution to 2) costs nothing: Simply, run some (not all) non-stop trains between the two cities. That will shave 30 minutes off the trip (well... 70 miles distance, for a train at 50 mph - should be travel time of 85 minutes). For more details (and a longer rant!!) read on! __________________________________________________ ____________ So, what seems to me to be the best service would be: 1) Frequent "commuter" type trains into/out of the two cities, at rush hours. I know for a fact many people who work in Galway city live near athenry/craughwell/ardrahan even Gort. So run a commuter service (every 20 minutes) from 7am to 9am from Gort in to Galway! (I guess, at the other end, there are commuters from Sixmilebridge/Ennis going to Limerick, so do the same there.) 2) Then, intercity services spread throughout the day, half of them "non stop" and half "stop everywhere". e.g. 3 in each direction of each type. (At a limit - maybe the "non-stop" one should stop in Ennis). What IE does not seem to get on a national basis is what has been happenning successfully in Europe for years: Trains do not have to stop everywhere, and moreover they SHOULD not all stop everywhere. The point is, that by running trains that stop in small places (and hence providing a _good_ service to the small numbers of people that live there), you provide a dis-service to the large numbers of people in the larger (cities), by having long journeys. This might not be so crucial, if the trains themselves were electric high-speed, that even by stopping everywhere, could easily beat the car/bus. But in Ireland, the train that stops everywhere will never beat the car/bus (at the moment there are non-stop buses running Galway-Dublin in 2.5 hours, beating the fastest trains 2.9 hours). And the bottom line is, even with all the other nice aspects of train travel, if it can't beat fairly significantly the car/bus (or ....dare I say it... the aeroplane), people won't use it in numbers. Lastly. Of course there will/would be protests from the people who live in smaller places at trains flying right through their place. But just, do the numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_popula tion Galway: 72,000 people Limerick: 90,000 people Ennis: 24,000 people. and all other stops en-route have less than 3,000 people. |
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