Killucan station campaign to reopen

Opening and re-opening stations on existing lines is the simpliest and cheapest way to improve rail transport in this country ...which is why I think the DOT will never do anything about it. I still can't get over the fact that Dunleer station on the Dublin-Belfast line is closed without any initiative to do anything about it.

Pre-COVID there was no capacity on the morning or evening trains, so any passengers here would be reducing capacity closer in and possibly pushing existing rail users back to the road. The extra 22000 intermediate cars should arrive this or next year though.

Additionally, it would make the journey slower for everyone further out. My opinion on this is that any further station openings West of Maynooth need to be combined with a speed or reliability increase elsewhere - so a new passing loop (the station itself is often the place for this, but Killucan already is a passing loop) or a TSR elimination - to make the end to end journey time stay the same.

While a "reopening" of a station closed that long is basically a fully new station build as it has to meet modern standards; we seem to be able to do stations for a fraction of the cost of the UK - Private Eye had a thing comparing Pelletstown at 10.5m with two platforms, bridge, ramps etc to the single platform Soham station in England costing 27m!

Stub roads in estates are often the developer thinking there's future land to be done rather than anything more deep than that - but the other evidence here suggests it could be something - that's a very wide and straight farm access off the junction.. There may be some stuff in current or old LAPs/CDPs

Opening a new station at Killucan is anything but as simple as some people might think. The easy bit is building the station itself.

The difficult bit is how you can schedule it and the impact that adding an extra stop might have. Adding an extra station means an extra three minutes lost in terms of journey time.

The most important thing to remember is that the Sligo line is single track between Maynooth and Sligo, with nine passing loops at different locations along the way (including Killucan) where trains can pass one another.

The core service is a train every two hours, which means typically trains are scheduled to pass one another at Maynooth, Edgeworthstown and Boyle, with other loops being used during peak times when extra trains run. But the timetable is constrained by where the loops are located.

For a single track railway to work, you need some "wriggle room", so typically a train travelling in one direction might have say six minutes in the schedule waiting at one passing loop, while the train it is passing has only one or two, and then at the next location where it passes a train, it might have two minutes and the other train six. That builds some resilience into the timetable, so that if one train is late for whatever reason, the knock-on effects will not carry on throughout the day,

There have been improvements in the sectional running times on the line, in other words the time taken to get from one passing loop to the next, but we have now got to the point where those improvements have been totally lost in terms of end-to-end journey time due to the loops now physically being in less than optimal locations. Those typically 6 minute waits are now ten or eleven minutes on the Sligo line because the trains are travelling faster between the loops, but the loops are still where they always were.

What is needed is for the line to be redoubled at a minimum from Maynooth to Kilcock, or Enfield, and in ideal world all the way to Mullingar. At the same time the passing loops at Edgeworthstown and Boyle would need to be extended several miles in each direction so that trains can pass one another on the move, rather than having to sit and wait at the stations. None of that would be cheap.

The main problem with adding a stop at Killucan is that I think it would render the basic two hourly service pattern next to near impossible as it would mean that trains were taking too long between Maynooth and Edgeworthstown (the typical passing locations), and there isn't a viable alternative passing pattern that would work. So you need improved infrastructure to be put in place before a new station can be added.

This is the sort of thing that the Strategic Rail Review needs to address.

Edit: Also elimination of the significant number of level crossings and accommodation (farm) crossings has to be a priority.

I'd love to get in a time machine back to Victorian times and ask the designers of the Midland Great Western railway what were they thinking putting the station there. I imagine even back then Kinnegad would have been a fairly busy thoroughfare and out of the two roads leading out of Killucan towards the canal and their new railway, MGWR built their station on the road going nowhere instead of the halfway house between Kinnegad and Killucan. Hopefully IE don't make the same mistake.

They weren't built primarily for passengers!

That was the canal he got diverted.

The railway company then bought the canal and built alongside it for much of the route

Actually the best thing they can do is to get Westmeath CoCo to prepare a business case for it, which they haven’t done yet.

Just to correct you - virtually no trains cross at Killucan any more and there certainly aren’t driver changes there.

Only the 16:00 Connolly/Sligo and 15 :05 Sligo/Connolly (Daily), and the 18:16 Connolly/Longford and the 16:55 Sligo/Connolly (Monday-Friday) cross at Killucan with one of each passing at line speed.

As I explained above, the station needs the extra infrastructure elsewhere along the line to be in place beforehand.