Can Anyone Tell Me Why a Heavy Rail Link to Dublin Airport Can Not be Built in the Short Term?

Prices have already increased substantially since pre-covid and record numbers will be using Dublin Airport this year. People want to go on holidays, plus the large numbers of recent immigrants who want to visit family, etc.

Anyway, none of this matters, Metrolink isn’t about Dublin Airport, it is about connecting Swords to Dublin, whose population is expected to grow to 100,000 by 2035 and the other dozen stops along the way.

Yes, which is why the DAA recently finished building a second runway, are planning for demand at the airport to grow to 40 million (from 33 at the moment) over the next few years and have plans for extensive increase in terminal and aircraft capacity with the new development at the airport.

The projections for the airline industry across Europe is for very large increases is passenger numbers over the next decade, which is why Boeings and Airbus aircraft order books are sold out for years to come.

They will continue to be fuelled with Aviation fuel (yes oil) for the foreseeable future.

Peak oil is nonsense, the world is awash with oil, fracking and shale oil in the US has unlocked vast amounts of oil. Combine that with dropping demand for oil as cars switch the EV, means that oil is cheap and plentiful.

Yes, we will have to pay carbon tax on that fuel, so more expensive flights, but people seem quiet willing to pay that cost. People will pay a bit more for their flight to Spain, then holiday in an expensive hotel in Kerry or dear lord take a ferry!

Just to be clear, demand currently far outstrips capacity in the airline industry. Pretty much every airline is seeing massive demand and they want to add capacity by buying more aircraft (so more routes, frequency, etc.) however Boeing/Airbus are at maximum manufacturing capacity, making every aircraft they can.

Let me put this in context for you, if you ordered a new A320 from Airbus today, it wouldn't arrive until 2030! That is how high demand is, they are booked out for years.

In 2022 the Global airline industry was worth $500 million, it is expected to grow to $1.1 Trillion by 2030.

LMAO, Boeing's backlog now stands at 5,600 aircraft and they had record orders in 2023, 1,456 aircraft ordered!

Boeing's fundamental issues was greedy management making short term decisions to make record profits and boost stock price at the cost of quality and good engineering. In other words the complete opposite of what you said.

The history here is when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged, it was a reverse take over, the excellent engineering/quality lead management of Boeing were replaced by the MBA/Wall Street type of managers from MD, who had already destroyed MD and then started doing the same to Boeing.

Despite all of this and the tragic crashes and quality issues at Boeing, the airline industry is still so desperate for new aircraft, that Boeing is still able to make record sales, despite all their problems. It shows how massive demand in the industry is.

To be clear, when I said record profits, I was talking back before the 737 MAX crashes and all the issues with MCAS.

I'm talking about the period after the merger of MD and Boeing (1997), when the MD management basically replaced the Boeing management and started to make short terms decisions that were great for short term profitably and stock growth, but terrible for safety and the manufacturers long term health.

Spirit AeroSystems was created out of Boeing during this period and at the time it was hailed as a brilliant move by the Wall Street types, but has led to many of the cost cutting and quality issues. Then there is the whole MCAS stuff, etc.

You are absolutely correct, that Boeing is now in a rough state given the MAX crashes and all the quality issues since then. Though there were signs even before then with the Dreamliner and 777x issues.

However the point really is to show how relatively healthy the broader airline industry is, despite all of Boeing's issues, airlines are still buying their aircraft in record numbers because demand is so high and Airbus is at maximum capacity.

As an aside, the US government won't leave them go to the wall, they are too important to the US, both in terms of the civilian aviation market, but more importantly the military side. F15, F18, F22, Apache, tankers, bombers, UAV's, missiles, etc. are all too important with China on the horizon. Of course they could possibly break it up, but we will see.

They actually continued to make extremely healthy profits through the period of those troubles with the 787!

This graph only goes back to 2009, but it shows the trend:

But it was similar in 2007 and 2008:

2020, is the first time they made an actual lose!

Not that I don't agree with you that the writing was on the wall of trouble ahead with the 787. But at that point they were still making big profits due to their cost cutting, Spirit, etc.

It would be insanely expensive (much more then Quad tracking the Northern line) and largely pointless.

Just extend Metrolink to Donabate or Rush and Lusk and 99% of this talk about extending heavy rail to the airport goes away.

No one coming from Belfast is going to care that they have to interchange with a Metro that passes every 90 seconds!

I thought the goal was to build an efficient and cost effective public transport network that well integrates all the forms of public transport, including private buses, to get people where they need to go fast and efficiently.

The private coach companies are the best thing to happen to intercity public transport in 20 years in Ireland. Getting people quickly and comfortably between our cities and airports at a very low cost and forcing Irish Rail to actually be competitive, to innovate and keep ticket prices to low.

Why wouldn’t you love that?

I’d really hope folk aren’t suggesting we spend Billions or even tens of Billions on rail just because of some weird jealousy of the private bus companies! The goal really has to be much more than that, if you are just taking people out of private coaches, then you have failed miserably, we have far better things to spend billions on then that!

Don’t get me wrong, I fully supporting improving the heavy rail network, but it needs to be done in a sensible manner, with a focus on the projects that will have the greatest benefit in the shortest time.

People waste so much time banging on about crazy projects to connect the heavy rail network to the airport, meanwhile the Enterprise only runs every two hours, non of our intercity rail network is electrified and large parts of it are still single track!

This is all very much cart before the horse stuff, build Metrolink, DART+ and fix the above and then we can start talking about the airport.

20+ years of travelling between Cork and Dublin by both train and intercity coach. My worst experience was an extra 3 hours stuck on a broken down train, while the most delayed I've been on a coach was 25 minutes into Cork because the Jack Lynch Tunnel was closed and caused traffic to back up.

I've found the coach (at least to Cork, but also less regularly to Galway/Belfast) to be extremely punctuational, rarely more then a 5 minutes difference (often 5 minutes early). As a result, I travel monthly by coach to Cork, when in the past I always took the train, I actually prefer the coach.

The way some people go on about trains here, you would think they are high speed TGV type trains or something like that, rather then rather slow, bouncy, noisy experience. As a result coaches can be very competitive.

Your experience of coaches might be different, you might not like them, that is fine, but it is hardly a reason to spend hundreds of millions or billions of tax payer money, just to save someone 5 minutes swapping from rail to a Metro!

I don't say the above to rag on Irish Rail or anything like that, just being honest, because I think we have the outlines of a really decent rail network, we just need to upgrade it and make better use of it. Electrify the lines, which should make it faster, quieter and less bouncy and now you have a decent competitive service.

I don't think it is particularly useful for the IR CEO to be going on about this link to the airport that was already studied and rejected. I'd rather see IR focus on DART+, maybe quad tracking, improving the core intercity network, etc.

Sure once all of that is done, then it would make sense to look at this project again and see if it still makes sense or some version of it. But personally I'd consider it to be super low priority, there are so many more important projects to work on first.