Waterford Rosslare to close

[James Howard]

From the perspective of somebody who practically lives on the Sligo line, but who has never used the Rosslare - Waterford line, it does appear to me that Irish Rail have basically willfully wound this service up and have been building the business case since the beet trains ended.

Freight is now a red herring - it doesn't exist in any meaningful quantity anymore apart from the odd bulk service.

If you look at the Sligo line, what has made a massive difference is the two-hour service. 10 or 15 years ago, it was the default choice to drive to Dublin city centre from Longford, but this is no longer true. We now have a service every 2 hours and in the morning and evening peaks, the gap is less than an hour. Irish Rail were very clever over the last couple of years with the attention grabbing 10 euro day returns which got people onto the trains. Once people get into the habit, they will quite willingly pay the normal 25 euro day return and sit down with a paper and a cup of coffee.

If you compare the Waterford/Rosslare service, it appears to me that the same strategy would at least have been worth a try. Yes, Waterford station is in an awkward place, but Dublin Connolly isn't exactly convenient for the hospitals or south city centre shopping districts which are the main destinations for day trippers. Irish Rail have obviously decided the (relatively) high-frequency approach works given that they have adopted the same idea on the WRC.

But to test this approach woudl have required getting the operational costs of the line in order. Irish Rail have concluded (correctly in my opinion) that the only way to keep the service running is to automate signalling and level crossings and get the staffing levels down. This is what is happening on the Sligo line.

Now if it had been three or four years ago, it would have been a simple matter to go an ask the Brians to get the checkbook out. But this is out of the question now. The writing is on the wall for all infrastructural investment beyond keeping the lights on and there is no way that anybody is going to start investing millions into a service with a proven revenue base barely stretching into six figures. There was also the matter of the fact that a lot of the line needed renewing.

So this year, rightly or wrongly, the Irish Rail subsidy was cut and they needed to find a few million to keep the system running. So they shut down the lowest revenue and highest cost part of the system.

It is a sad end and one hopes that they will maintain it to the extent that it can be started up again in a few years if there is a few quid to spend. It would certainly be have been preferable to invest in the rail service than building a white elephant of a motorway to Waterford where the traffic level is so low that it isn't economically viable to man a toll booth. But the money is spent now and what's done is done.

Those of us who depend on the Sligo can count our lucky stars that the bulk of the automation work is done because if the Sligo service was still performing the same as it was back in the early 90's, we would have been waving goodbye to it as well.