Irish rail fleet and infrastructure plans

that is good news and i agree, though i don't think the 8200s even saw 7 years in service did they?

I think the train experience for those as far out as Drogheda will be downgraded given that the DART will be stopping at all stations to Dublin City and they will be lacking in the on-board toilet department. Yeah, Intercity trains will still stop there. But, we need to keep the deal sweet for passengers too.

Kudos on the wheelchair friendly retractable ramps, the USB docks and ease of movement between carriages. Also, the overall look of the exterior is very nice with a continental touch in keeping with the X'Trapolis image.

A five car set will have room for 550 passengers, a 29000 has room for 819 passengers according to official figures, the DART fleet has similar capacity so a reduction in passenger capacity per set, however, service frequency and number of sets used would then need to be taken into account to see any +/- in passenger capacity.

I doubt every DART from Drogheda will be stopping at existing DART stops. It was overcrowded enough already in rush hour at Raheny for DART's from Malahide. Imagine trying to get on one from Drogheda!

This sounds like continued track renewal and ballast cleaning. Interested to know what minor works they refer to at Limerick Junction and does this funding include the Curragh upgrade assuming not.

The Cork LC project will be separate funding and this might be the first reference to 125mph running not that it can happen anytime soon.

As for journey, presume that is just restoring the 2019 schedule before they added 8-10 minutes to Cork services.

I believe it's 266km from Heuston to Cork?

In my opinion, two hours should be the target timing.

That means 133kph average speed.

After the 94.5 million expenditure, is that achievable, assuming few stops?

Or is it achievable non-stop?

There doesn't need to be trails.

Can Cork-Dublin non-stop be done in 2h yes, can it ben done in 2 hours during peak periods not reliably so 2h05-2h10m is reasonable. Its been discussed before the 2h15m (now 2h19m) is like this because IE taught they could just slot the service and screw other services. That didn't work and its ran over 2h15m late almost every single day so they added a few more minutes to make it on time.

From day one it was un acceptable to arrive in Heuston at 08.25, 08.35 or 08.40. It had to be 08.30 but they had to admit defeat. I am sure when there is a full shake up of the timetable in future they will force the 08.30 arrival again and make sure it works but other services will suffer.

There is no reason the 07.00/09.00 etc and every second train after isn't 2h20m while the 08.00/10.00 have a block time of 2h25-30m.

The current timetable is shocking, great for the poster printers of on time performance but I think its the worst timetabling casting in years by so called experts.

Some questions on the new DART+ order:

Does the 80km range imply that a journey on batteries can only be for <40kms each way assuming no charging at the turn-around point?

Assuming charging is necessary, how long will it take? Remember existing trains can be turned around in under 10 minutes if necessary.

Why 5-car trains? Existing platforms can take 8 suburban or DART cars. However the Alsthom document refers to 83m-long trains, which implies very short cars (c 16m). Of course in this case 2 five-car units would fit existing platforms.

Are the sets articulated? This makes for much reduced weight and less maintenance on bogies. Of course it makes any deletion or addition of cars a much more difficult operation.

Battery technology has improved by about 2 orders of magnitude since the 1930s. Hence my question about the very short (80km) range.

Remember that the new trains will be "walk through" which shortens the connection between the coaches, rather than corridor connections with doors, and the individual coaches will be a little shorter than the current ones.

The net effect is that a new five-car train will be comparable to a four-car train in length terms, but will carry more passengers due to the more open nature of the train.

They are short cars, 5=4 of existing length.

They are fully articulated, open tram-like structure inside.

I see the post I was replying to above has vanished

As for the doors thing - what? The location of where the doors go when sliding has no impact on the required platform length.

Being short, there should be less of an issue of making the carriages wider than current stock. AFAIK the LHB DARTs are 9' 6" wide. Irish loading gauge allows for up 10' 2" (Or it used to anyway). That sort of width would not be possible for longer stock but if the new carriages are to be even shorter than current DART carriages (and would probably be the shortest length passenger carriages in the country), I wonder if they would be made wider to maximise the available loading gauge?

Past UK sourced rolling stock was a maximum 9' 3" wide, that being the widest that carriages seem to be for the smaller UK loading gauge. Older Irish stock was built right up to the maximum 10' 2" width and it would be wasteful to specify that the carriages are narrower.

The X'Trapolis 2.0 trains for Australia that the Irish order is based on (correct me if I am wrong on that) are 9' 11" wide and the track gauge is the same as Ireland. Each carriage is longer than what will be in the Irish order but surely it would be relatively simple to shorten the carriages and keep them the same width - in fact I would imagine that the less changes made to dimensions would result in cost savings. The X'Trapolis 2.0 trains for Australia order will also have 5' 3" bogies plus they will run on 1,500v DC. So many boxes ticked without having to make the order such a special case to fit the Irish requirements.

God, that SEUPB piece in the previous post is the most convoluted piece of corporate gobbledegook I've seen in a long time. (What is SEUPB by the way?)

The Dublin-Belfast route has congestion problems between Dublin and Drogheda and also between Portadown and Belfast, due to increasing commuter traffic. What is needed is capacity improvements on these sections to benefit not just intercity but also shorter-distance commuters. For example bi-directional signalling with frequent high-speed crossovers, quadruple tracking in some places where there space for this., end higher line speeds where possible.

Forget any fancy TGV stuff: it's hugely expensive and for the relatively short distances involved the time savings are quite small. It's not like Paris-Bordeaux or Barcelona-Madrid, for heaven's sake. Dublin-Belfast is a medium-distance corridor, with a lot of short-distance traffic as well, and a fairly modest population to boot.

DUB-BEL is currently at best 2h05 with 4 stops. They were talking about 90 mins end to end in the 90s, surely that's achievable now with modest investment, it's only 160km.

Thanks, Peregrine for the clarification. I'm all for peace and cross-border co-operation, but the irony is that the cross-border bit of Dublin-Belfast is probably the least congested part of the entire network. Improving capacity on Dublin-Drogheda and Belfast-Portadown would benefit commuter services in these areas as well as speeding up Enterprise services. Also these improvements are warranted on more orthodox grounds than promoting peace, and should perhaps be assessed on that basis.

I love it. The Examiner link has a photo of a MarkIV train, one of the few intercity trains which is not a 22k. But it's Cork, boy, so that's OK.

these are just centre cars yeah? So won't enable any additional services, just longer trains?

Looking at the price of petrol they should add a few more cars onto the order !

Nothing mentioned in the official new fleet announcements made so far about Aircon from what I saw.