Thanks to Andrew Waldron for the link to this film, The Clanrye Connection, about Newry and its transport systems: the inland canal, the ship canal and the railways. The film was made by the BBC in 1996 and is about 50 minutes long.
There is even an electric tram.
The Irish Times has a piece about the numbers of people travelling on some or all of a railway line from Limerick to Galway. But the article is entirely useless in enabling assessment of whether the line should be kept open. It tells us nothing about the costs of running the line, the cost of the £110 million of capital spent on it or the income generated by the passengers. Furthermore, it does not discuss the alternatives (buses) and their costs, whether to the user or to the taxpayer.
I can’t find information about individual lines either in the CIE annual report for 2017 [PDF] or in the most recent annual report for Iarnród Éireann (which runs the railways), which is for 2015.
I suspect, therefore (but am of course open to correction), that this is fake news, marketing or PR: a partial account of the line’s operations, intended to give the impression that it is a Good Thing. And because the important information is omitted, I suspect that it is not favourable to those arguing for ever-larger train sets whereon they may play with the choo-choos.
Incidentally, the number of passengers is about one quarter of that achieved by the Dublin & Kingstown Railway in its first year of operation in the 1830s.
None, or at least very little. A sensible government would regard the current union activity as a suicide note, but I suppose support for a technology of the nineteenth century is at least marginally better than suppord for one of the eighteenth. Brian Lucey has the right idea, although I’m puzzled by his proposed route from Dublin to Cork.
Posted in Ashore, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Ireland, Operations, Rail
The Irish Times reports that numbers of passengers on the Western Rail Corridor from Limerick to Galway are at about two thirds of the level assumed in the “business case”.
Well I never. Who could have known?
Irish waterways history