The Kettle's Boyled: We don’t need trains to Connolly Station
Roads and rail have been poorly resourced, with speed and efficiency dropping to third-world standards at times.
Here in North Roscommon, most of our freight is moved by road, as is a lot of the transport of people. The economic corridor between Sligo and Dublin, where a lot of this activity takes place, has suffered from years of neglect by decision-makers.
Roads and rail have been poorly resourced, with speed and efficiency dropping to third-world standards at times. Politicians seem not to be too bothered, tending to clamour for unattainable and often impractical solutions while ignoring the blindingly obvious.
The N4 is fine from Dublin to Mullingar, but then starts to peter out until it reaches Carrick-on-Shannon. A mixture of objections and apathy around a bypass for Carrick has caused a bottleneck at the bridge there, with long delays now a permanent feature.
The service on the Sligo-Dublin rail line is slow; a relatively short 120 mile journey between Dublin and Sligo takes three and a half hours. You could save an hour if you made the trip by car, with about ten places along the road where you could grab a cup of coffee, something not possible on a train that lacks a simple catering trolley.
The route needs double tracking and electrification, but that would require politicians to fight for it. In practice, they don’t, or most of them don’t. Indeed many prefer to divert their political capital into an attempt to have a railway built from Claremorris to Collooney, an unsuitable corridor that serves a tiny fraction of the population living along the Dublin-Sligo line. They missed a huge opportunity with the 2024 All-Ireland strategic rail review, when national rail policy was decided for the period up to 2050. Instead of making gains on Dublin-Sligo, they wasted all their efforts on a fantasy project that was never going to happen.
Despite having lost out in that review, there are still obvious opportunities that are very achievable. Independent Sligo Councillor Marie Casserly spotted one such potential improvement, managing to get the backing of Sligo County Council to ask Irish Rail to add an additional stop at Broombridge in West Dublin, the terminus of the LUAS Green Line. This has proved a resounding success, with most Dublin-bound passengers now alighting at Broombridge. The next logical step is to introduce a shuttle bus between Broombridge and Dublin Airport, with integrated ticketing, so that somebody in Boyle or Sligo could buy a single through ticket to the airport. Simple stuff.
The other obvious opportunity is to terminate Sligo trains at Broombridge altogether, creating a transport hub there for LUAS, DART and mainline rail. There is no need to run the Dublin-Sligo train into central Dublin, and the time and rolling stock wasted in sending almost empty trains into Connolly Station could be better utilised by adding an extra round trip to the route each day.
But it would be a brave politician that would suggest that; the opposition would crucify them.
