Irish Rail Continue To Falsify Service Reliability Statistics
October 19th 2009
Rail Users Ireland can reveal that yet again Irish Rail has faked performance posters for Dublin's DART service. Despite claiming no cancellations in the last 4 week period, at least 5 services did not operate as planned for reasons within Irish Rail's control. On Friday 2nd October a DART service broke down at Portmarnock due to an onboard technical problem. As a result at least 2 trains to Malahide and 2 from Malahide operated only to/from Howth Junction, making matters worse one of these trains ran non stop between Booterstown and Bray in a desperate attempt to avoid the train being recorded as late.
As several DART services failed to (quoting Irish Rail's customer charter) "run as planned" they must be therefore recorded as cancelled, not so as Irish Rail have reported zero cancellations for the September 7th - October 4th 4 week measurement period.
Once again Rail Users Ireland exposes the misleading and blatantly false service reliability statistics presented by Irish Rail. Furthermore Rail Users Ireland can reveal that despite commitments from Irish Rail not one single reliability and punctuality notice seen at stations around the country has been subject to audit. Irish Rail have been unable to identify the company which Irish Rail claim to audit their figures. Rail Users Ireland understands that in fact no audit is performed on behalf of Irish Rail and that a quarterly audit is performed by the Department of Transport instead, long after the posters have been taken down.