DART+ (DART Expansion)

Connecting Metrolink to the heavy rail line at Donabate would be very diffiicult given the development around the station. Any above ground proposal would be objected to into oblivion.

Not sure where the AISRR comes into it when it didn't mention Donabate at all and actually proposes a new rail line bypassing Donabate.

Would have thought the best way of connecting with the mainline was at Rush & Lusk.

I don't see the southeast of Donabate as suitable for a Metrolink approach. It would have to cross both the rail line and the new ring road. As to get parallel to the rail line, you either have to swing wide south of the ring road which takes you into marshy estuary land and nature reserve, or you swing round north of the ring road which is earmarked for development. You would have to demolish protected buildings to get to the station.

Donabate station has limited space to create an interchange station. R&L has lots of room to provide multiple heavy rail and Metrolink platforms which would be needed.

I've been of the opinion, (perhaps not a widely held one) that "Metro North" should be a quad track heavy rail line from Hueston, City Centre, Airport and join the Belfast line somewhere around Rush & Lusk

The idea seems to be mostly based on bringing people from Cork and Limerick directly to Dublin Airport. DUB is struggling to provide facilities for current demand, never mind adding several million more passengers from the other side of the country, particularly when existing airports in those regions have unutilised capacity. Travel demand between Belfast and Cork/Limerick is tiny and even a through service would see few passengers making that trip each day.

It's a pure fantasy which would cost €100bn to get everything in place, not worth thinking about.

The priority is to make life easier for the rail commuters in Dublin.

20-minute gaps during commuting hours that facilitate inter-city would be eliminated. Better for the huge numbers that will be using DART.

The thing is, with my proposal, they will have better access to all of the lines, other than Dart Coastal South. Like heavy rail in Paris, there will be connections with Dart SW, Dart W, Metrolink and Dart N.

@Pete_Cavan I agree with your point entirely, but your final question is interesting, so here are the cities that have built multi-billion euro tunnels through their centres for mainline rai. None of these really support us doing the same in Dublin, for various reasons, but here’s what I could find:

Madrid has a high-speed rail tunnel running beneath the city from Atocha station in the south to Chamartín-Clara Campoamor at the north. This is a high-speed rail line, though, and it follows a pattern in the Spanish HSR system of tunnelling under city centres: Barcelona and Zaragoza are the same. On a HSR network, it makes sense to link city stations like this, as it increases the catchment for the high-sped line. But I think we can all agree that HSR is not viable in Ireland - not because of cost, but because our distances are far too short.

So, strictly mainline inter-city tunnels? There’s only two… and a half… examples:

First, Berlin built a North-South mainline rail tunnel, opened in 2006. However, unlike Dublin, Berlin is a hub for international rail travel, with a catchment of about 40 million people along the lines that converge on it. A sizeable share of trains arriving at Berlin are for destinations beyond the city, and the existing rail links, shared with the Berlin S-Bahn in places, were a major bottleneck. Removing that regional bottleneck was the justification for the new tunnel, which was part of a wider plan to undo the severing of cross-city transport links in the DDR years.

A more extreme case is the Willemspoort tunnel under Rotterdam that carries a metro service and mainline trains on its four tracks. But the reason for this expense wasn’t to connect the city’s stations, but to eliminate an opening rail bridge (De Hef) over the harbour that created scheduling problems for the entire Dutch railway network.

That’s it for the modern projects, now the “half”, which is Prague. Prague has lots of mainline rail tunnels. The main ones are the four parallel Vinohrady tunnels, linking Smichov to the west and Eden and Vrsovice stations to the East with the Main Station to the North: the first two are 19th Century, the fourth was opened in 1989 (under the communist Fourth Czechoslovak republic), so costs are nothing like they’d be for a modern project. Again, though, Prague has the same excuse as Berlin: a hub in the international rail network.