an 8 minute commute?
the last guy who was boasting about an 8 minute commute on here had a breakdown
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Yeah but he wasn’t a lying cunt like the other lad.
Well at least he didn’t have far to walk so.
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Ooooooffftttt.
550 euro per passenger.
Thats what it costs to run the Limerick to Bally Ballybrophy train line.
Or so they tell me
Now there’s a shithole of a trainline.
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Alan Kelly was on the radio this morning defending this. He’s an odious creep.
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I’d believe it.
Sure the only people who take that train have free travel passes.
Take the two most populous places on the line, Limerick & Nenagh, there would be a fair amount of commuters between both.
There is no train from Nenagh in the morning, you can get a bus to Birdhill @7.45 & change there for the train, journey takes about an hour according to the Irish rail website. So you get in @8.45. So if you don’t work within a ten minute walk of the train station and start at 9, forget about it.
If you start before 9, forget about it altogether. Imagine you start at half 9 & you love public transport so the bus train combo suits, there is only one train home, 16.55. So unless you finish work at half four you are fucked.
Lets assume 50% of people work suitable hours, which is very generous and considering again at least 50% (probably more) of people work either in the Raheen industrial estate or in Castletroy, then that’s 3 quarters of your target market gone straight away.
And the best part is you’ll pay €12.75 one way according to the Irish rail website 
Even with taxsavers etc. lets say you are paying €50 a week for the service.
I don’t know if there’d be much demand going the other way, but you can’t anyway, unless you leave @6.30.
Now your alternative options:
The bus (itself a terrible service) 50 mins, much more frequent departures, €35 for ten journeys, so with tax savers etc your probably around €25 a week. That’s just bus eireann as well there are private operators on the route too.
Drive; About half an hour door to door. No messing, no waiting.
So why the fuck would you take the train to commute? Answer, you wouldn’t and people don’t.
So commuters don’t use it, who else could use it? Day trippers, nope for the reasons above. Students, nope because there are private services that drop you to the gate of your college and are quicker and cheaper. OAPs maybe but even for free you’d struggle to find a reason to take it.
The same is true for all the other stops too.
You don’t use that line from Limerick to Dublin as it’s way longer (time wise not distance wise as the train has to go really slow due to lack of upgrades), so the only people that use it are people from Nenagh, Birdhill and Roscrea travelling to Dublin. They have the option of one train in the morning or one in the evening each way. That’s a fairly niche market considering it’s cheaper and quicker to drive.
What they need to do is upgrade the line so that if you are travelling from Limerick to Dublin you’ll go that way, it makes a whole pile more sense than going down to Limerick junction and then up. But what they’ll actually do is run the service into the ground make it nonviable then say sure its costing us €550 a passenger, we can’t sustain it, there’s no demand.
I know I put way too much thought into that but fucking Irish rail are a real bug bear of mine.
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It would probably suit a lot of interrailers who would like to see Nenagh.
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It is the heartbed of backpacking in the south west midlands alright
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Living the dream in Nayna
“Rail Enthusiasts” on the news there, up early to be on the first scheduled service throughout the Phoenix Park tunnel.
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This rail tunnel hoo-haa has me puzzled. On the 1st Sept 1996 I traveled by train from Limerick to Connolly station, passing through a long tunnel which was explained to us as being under the Phoenix Park.
It has always been used for special trains, never for scheduled services.
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God bless us, we get excited about the opening of a tunnel which has been there since 1877.
I shouldn’t have judged that chap but I did. You think he would have waited for a later train when it was bright. Would have been more noticeable when the train was going in to the tunnel.
Alas no DART Underground still 
A metaphor for the day .