Irish Rail hot food

Now that the pandemic is mostly behind us and public transport is back to 100% capacity, albeit with mandatory masks, does anyone know when it might be possible to buy food or drink of any kind on a train in Ireland? I'm also curious if anyone knows whether the enterprise service is already back to offering food...

You need quite a lot of customers for onboard catering to work. Demand is only back on weekends - the weekday morning Sligo service which would have been packed to the gills this time of year in 2019 (actually too packed for the trolley to work, really) now has entire empty seat bays of 4+4 for instance.

It'll be 6 weeks or so until there is any chance of the college and office reopenings to bring demand back up.

As for tenders, I would assume the existing contract is in place and just suspended.

Says nothing about hot food, just trolley services rolled out further.

40 years ago when the InterCity trains were launched you could get a freshly cooked full Irish breakfast on the Cork-Dublin train, there was also the trolley service which served tea/coffee, cakes, biscuits and peanuts.

times change suck it up is a meaningless statement really.

rail does have to offer something more then just being an over-priced bus service on the long distance routes, so the poster's point is valid in terms of how the service offers less but for higher fares then previously.

Write Irish Rail a strongly worded letter then instead of whinging online about it.

The thing is that most of the "long-distance" routes in Ireland are not really that long. It is not uncommon for a Deutsche Bahn ICE to run all the way from Hamburg in the north of the country to Munich or Stuttgart in the south. This can easily amount to 5-6 hours. EuroCity services can run for even longer. I still remember that, during my last year in boarding school in Austria, I would end up sitting on a EuroCity train between Linz in Austria and Frankfurt in Germany for six hours. And that train came from Vienna and would continue on to Dortmund after. On services of that length, having a full-service restaurant car, or even the type of Bar/Bistro thing you get on the TGV makes sense. I used that regularly on those long services (and always counted my blessings when a Croatian or Austrian restaurant car made its way into the consist!)

Now contrast that to Ireland. I think the Cork-Dublin line is the longest line in the network as far as distance covered is concerned, with 255 kilometers according to a quick dirty check on Google Maps. Travel time? Two and a half hours. Meanwhile, the longest duration train ride I've ever been on has been the service from Connolly to Sligo, which, while geographically shorter at 204 kilometers, took nearly four hours. Those are the facts on the ground here. Would I want a better catering offer? Sure. But unlike on the continent, such an offer is not crucial.

As for your argument about differentiating itself from the bus, that's basically a non-issue. The very fact that it's a train is the big differentiator. Even the Class 22000 "InterCity RailCars", which are by far the weakest part of Irish Rail's InterCity/long distance offer in my opinion, offer a better passenger experience than the likes of Aircoach, GoBus or Bus Éireann, and that's only looking at second class. The first class experience is a whole different matter entirely. The thing is that bus operators compete on price because that's all they can do. They can't compete on service, so attempting to "attack" them on that axis will not yield any results, as their target audience really doesn't care about that.

You could just as easily apply that sentiment to any post on boards, to be fair.

It's a discussion forum and I reckon it's fair enough to point out that IR offer a worse service than they used to.

There are no Darts every 10 mins… they wanted to bring it in but it has not happened. The Greens are too much focused on f*cking up the road network and destroying the Retail sector in the city centre before they get kicked out of office.

deleted as post didn't quote.

the greens just want the road network for those who really have to use it, and they have to get cars out of the cities as they are smogging up the place and holding them back.

once they do that our cities will be pleasant spaces to live and do everything else, i look forward to the day that the only vehicles i see are busses and trams.

there is a 10 minute dart service in theory, as in a dart is supposed to come every 10 minutes from i think bray to houth junction.

unfortunately at the moment there is not enough stock to actually operate it, even with 8 car sets halved to 4 and few 8 car sets running.

i'm not sure if the original dart sets from the 80s still run as 6 cars and i believe they are having reliability issues now, so that won't help if that is the case.

new stock is coming so hopefully that will solve those issues, hold firm.

I remember as well the server gave me extra bacon with no charge - as they had some left over. Wonderful!!

online fares are not the only fares and i believe lots still buy tickets at stations which are more expensive then previously so yes some fares are competitively priced but generally they are promotional in lots of cases or you have to be travelling a bit away from when you book.

thing is the service deteriorated later on in it's life so that would have sent users elsewhere, so the lower or lack of usage will have been partly to a big or small extent down to just wanting to do bare minimum rather then providing a good service which simply lost users and became unprofitable because of reasons.

also the only thing about irish rail that is or was ever profitable is and was freight, and irish rail do have a history of claiming something is unprofitable when they just don't want to do it, a history that goes back to the CIE days and it is an easy statement for the general public to understand and won't question.

remember it's only me you and others online who question things about pt and related and it's operators, that is changing but slowly but the general public dont think deeply hence why we have had the pt issues we have had for decades.

no rose tinted glasses from me but just experience as there was a lot about rail travel then that was also rubbish whether it be the general state of rolling stock and infrequent services ETC.

The 10 ICR premier cars have the ability for certain hot food; but I'd imagine that the Belfast hourly and Cork services will use all those up.

the "x will do you" nonsense is the exact contempt that has sent passengers to alternatives to the railway.

thankfully the days of you and CIE deciding what will do people are over, whether hot food would ever make a comeback or not (and it makes no odds to me either way) isn't relevant to, nor will change that fact thank god.