Experienced a rather nervous journey from a Kerry town to Dublin recently on the much-touted new Irish Rail Inter-City rolling stock. It should be called jumping stock. On a number of occasions when the train appeared to be at full tilt (still very slow by European standards) it jerked quite violently. Certainly violently enough to have you wearing your tea had you been holding it at that moment. It almost felt like the train had left the tracks.
In between the violent jerks there was the more familiar general shaking and shuddering. Makes going to the toilet very interesting.
In France, for example, the TGV reaches must faster speeds than the Irish rail system and yet it is an incredibly smooth ride. Clearly, the physical track network in Ireland is in dire need of re-laying if we are to be able to upgrade to faster trains in the future. Couple this with the lack of sets of parallel lines between key locations, and this makes for a pretty third-world rail system. A ‘first-world’ rail system would route inter-city trains past or around regional services by having more than one track going in the same direction. This would also allow proper express trains between major cities, thus cutting down further on the time taken. Newbury is a commuter town in Berkshire, about one hour by train from London (Paddington I think). If you stand at the train station you will notice that there are four track lines. The two inside track lines are for trains that are going straight past Newbury without stopping. So they can hurtle by on their merry way at almost full speed (it’s a bit scary if you are not expecting it so I think they give a warning).
This kind of investment in the track infrastructure is what the Irish State should have been doing during the good times when the coffers were full to the brim. Instead, Irish Rail tinkered around the edges, jazzing-up train stations and rolling stock. The prehistoric rail network remains.
Tags: Inter-city, Irish Rail, Kerry, Newbury, rail, rail system, rolling stock, TGV, tracks
