[Opinion] French rail system thrived as we took the wrong track

[essoII]

THE SNCF website has been in a celebratory mood this year, with colourful balloons and clinking glasses of champagne to celebrate “TGV-30 ans!â€� – the 30th anniversary of the Train Ã* Grande Vitesse, which revolutionised passenger transport in France and inspired other countries to follow its example, most recently China.

I’ll never forget being on board one of the earlier TGVs as it whizzed through the French countryside like an orange streak from the Gare de Lyon in Paris to Le Creusot, more than half way to Lyon. As everyone who has used high-speed trains in France knows, it’s an exhilarating experience that puts Irish railways in the ha’penny place.

The TGV network has expanded considerably since then, with entirely new railway lines running to the north, south, east and west. Travel times from Paris have been dramatically reduced – to less than two hours to Lyon, just over two hours to Lille, slightly more to Bordeaux, and less than 3½ hours to Marseille.

In Ireland we have put our faith in motorways rather than railways. With the major inter-urban road network completed, it is now quicker to get around by car than it is by train. A recent trip from Cork to Dublin in a congested people-carrier took just two hours and 10 minutes from the Jack Lynch Tunnel to the Central Bank on Dame Street. The fastest train would have taken 2½ hours.

Similarly, the M1 has bled the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise “express� of passengers, particularly in first-class, because it’s just as quick – if not quicker – to drive between the two cities. The same phenomenon is being repeated for journeys between Dublin and Galway, Limerick and Waterford.

In the US, Broadway and Hollywood stars used to travel by train between New York and Los Angeles; Union Station in Chicago was then the great meeting point. But the interstate highway programme championed by Dwight Eisenhower and, later, the availability of intercity air travel reduced the railways to residual services.

Perhaps the danger of us repeating what happened in the US occurred to someone in Iarnród Éireann before it put forward a modest proposal that the Government should invest an additional €175 million to deliver journey times of under two hours for services between Dublin and Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford.

This would not “put us in the high-speed rail class like the TGV�, as the company’s spokesman admitted, but it would place Ireland “among the best of conventional railways� in the EU, with speeds of up to 160km/h. The new(ish) trains we’ve imported from Spain and South Korea could do that but sections of track still need upgrading.

The cost would work out at just over a fifth of the price we paid to run the M3 motorway through the landscape of Tara – to cater for projected traffic volumes that haven’t materialised. The ghost motorways are also costing us year on year. Because ludicrously optimistic traffic projections have not been realised, the National Roads Authority (NRA) is already paying compensation to the PPP (public-private partnership) consortiums that built these roads to make up for the paltry revenue they are currently raising from tolls.

Week after week, it seems, we learn more and more about squandermania during the boom – and its bitter legacy. The truth is that the Fianna Fáil-led government lost the run of itself in 1999 when it junked the NRA’s proposals to upgrade existing main roads and opted instead for five greenfield motorways.

Similarly, plans by the Dublin Transportation Office in Platform for Change (2000), proposing massive investment in a whole series of rail projects, including metro, Dart, suburban rail and Luas lines to create a mesh of public transport services in the capital, were approved by the same government that baulked at linking up the Luas lines.

The focus then switched from surface-running light rail to building the mainly underground Metro North – as a PPP project, naturally.

The likely cost became a closely guarded secret, but was deduced by The Irish Times to be €4.58 billion (in 2004). Some €200 million has already been spent on the project but it’s now unlikely to go ahead.

Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar is on record as saying that only one of the four “big ticket� transport projects for Dublin will proceed – Metro North, Dart Underground, the Luas link in the city centre (extended to Broombridge) or a rail spur to Dublin airport from Clongriffin (on the Dart line) serving nowhere along the way.

Varadkar has already cancelled more than 20 road plans, including a dual carriageway running right across south Wexford.

The wonder is that nobody in authority before now had the common sense to stand up to engineers with overblown projects – other than on the relatively few occasions that they were shot down by An Bord Pleanála.

But let us return, finally, to France. While we wasted money on nutty stuff like that and spent up to €22 million per acre acquiring slivers of land in yet-to-be developed Cherrywood for the Luas extension to Bride’s Glen, Bordeaux got on with building a surface-running light rail network that transformed the city into one of Europe’s finest.

And, naturellement , it’s also served by the TGV.

©Frank McDonald, Irish Times 2011.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...304137356.html

[Jack O'Neill]

Perhaps I could misquote Mathew Engel from "11 Minutes Late"...

Creating a viable transport network in the twenty-first century is one of the most complex responsibilities of a modern government. It requires long term planning and financial commitment. There is political risk because projects go wrong (remarkably often in the case of Ireland). And the reward may be so far in the future as to be invisible to politicians concerned with tomorrow's headlines, next weeks polls and next year's election.

Successive Ministers for Transport who cowered on major public transport projects in the late 1990's cost us this situation. And 11 years later...we have another one!

[Colm Moore]

Originally Posted by essoII

A recent trip from Cork to Dublin in a congested people-carrier took just two hours and 10 minutes from the Jack Lynch Tunnel to the Central Bank on Dame Street.

The driver should really (a) obey the speed limits* (b) stop at tolls and traffic lights, even if they were travelling at 5am. Lucky that a bathroom break wasn't needed.

* Maintaining the speed limits and assuming no stops for tolls, traffic lights, congestion, food / drink / bathroom breaks, phone calls. etc. would mean a travel time of 2 hours 11 minutes.

[Inniskeen]

Originally Posted by Colm Moore

The driver should really (a) obey the speed limits* (b) stop at tolls and traffic lights, even if they were travelling at 5am. Lucky that a bathroom break wasn't needed.

* Maintaining the speed limits and assuming no stops for tolls, traffic lights, congestion, food / drink / bathroom breaks, phone calls. etc. would mean a travel time of 2 hours 11 minutes.

Not much in the line of traffic lights on the motorway. Also there is little in the line of speed limits - just the overall 120kph. Given that the motorways are operating way below capacity it is perfectly possible to sit at the speed limit for almost the entire trip as congestion is rarely an issue. To compete the railway needs to move up a few gears and aim to operate, where possible, at 90 to 100mph on all routes.

[ACustomer]

The Frank McDonald piece is typical of the Irish Times: strong on opinion and weak on the facts.

The average speed on his Cork to Dublin journey was by my reckoning 119 kph. Given that the legal maximum is 120 and that there are at least 30 kms with limits of 100 kph or less, and a slow urban section between Newlands Cross and Temple Bar, as well as 2 toll booths, then the journey must have involved significant breaches of the speed limits. Does McDonald condone breaking the law like this?

His eulogy about the French TGV is beside the point: the size of France, the distance between major cities make it suitable for high-speed rail in a way which simply doesn't apply here. Relatively modest improvements should suffice to deliver 2h 30m Dublin-Cork and 1h40m Dublin-Belfast: talk of TGVs is pointless and only serves to scare people away from what seems an extravagant level of investment.

Also you would think that France was unique in terms of its investment in high-speed rail. What about Spain, for example?

[comcor]

2:15 is possible from Dunkettle to Newlands Cross, but God help you either side of them.

TBH While I'm a huge supporter of rail over road, I don't like the use of weasel words. The motorway across South Wexford isn't just for South Wexford, but links Munster and parts of Leinster to the Southern half o the UK and on to Mainland Europe. If we've committed ourselves to road freight, it's a significant piece of national infrastructure. You can argue the rights and wrongs of the that decision, but choosing to disguise the fact undermines the rest of your opinions.

[Thomas Ralph]

Originally Posted by comcor

2:15 is possible from Dunkettle to Newlands Cross, but God help you either side of them.

Have done 2:01 from J19 to Newlands Cross.