At last, a sensible railway proposal

J

jpd

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Irish Rail are to look at doubling up the tracks in north Dublin and Finglas to allow separation of mainline and commuter traffic and even a spur line to the airport

Why this wasn't proposed and done 50 years ago just shows how bad we are at infrastructure planning and implementation

It's unlikely to get done any time soon, but it has to be a cheaper option than an underground metro
 
It would also be great if they could get rid of level crossings in urban areas. The delays to traffic is dreadful.
 
There is one thing "having a look at building " and another actually doing it. It's not even about money it's about planning and thinking ahead because all that area beside railway would be heavily built up now so where are they going to put it?. Most of irish building experience is building on green field and open sites not putting infrastructure into heavily urbanised settings like other cities,
 
jpd said:
It's unlikely to get done any time soon, but it has to be a cheaper option than an underground metro
Click to expand...
It’s not an either/or - both should be done!

Four-tracking the Northern Line past Malahide is a no-brainer as it allows commuter and inter-city traffic without interference with each other.

By way of context Irish Rail is currently spending €100m on rejuvenating a single-line alignment for freight between Limerick and Foynes without an identified freight use case. If we can spend money on follies we can for sure spend money on useful stuff.
 



Both a metro to north Dublin suburbs and more capacity on the main railway line northbounds are required.

The five DART + projects aim to expand the capacity of the four railway lines: https://www.dartplus.ie/en-ie/home



The DART+ Coastal North Project will provide an extension of the existing electrified rail network from Malahide to Drogheda MacBride stations and will provide the infrastructure to facilitate an increase to the rail capacity on the Northern Line between Dublin City Centre and Drogheda MacBride Station, including the Howth Branch.The DART+ Coastal North project has now sought statutory approval for its design, with the submission of a Railway Order application to An Bord Pleanála on the 12th July 2024.


DART+ DART+ Coastal North

www.dartplus.ie
 
As well as the DART + north project going through the Railway Order process, IE have a project called FourNorth.



"Background In January IÉ applied to the EU for funding under its Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme to complete a range of studies to upgrade the Northern line to 4-track. This application was successful with an award of €1.2m recently confirmed through the Department of Transport. This intervention, as proposed by our long-term strategy and suggested for consideration by the draft All-island Strategic Rail Review, will build on DART+ Coastal North in support of raising the capacity of the railway for all users along the line. The project will complete a range of studies that take the 4-track proposal through the initial Government decision making stage."



 
All these publications and nice sound names etc like dart+dart+coastal North don't really go into the specifics of what's involved. So 4 tracks will be installed between malahide and drogheda? So the mainline Belfast train runs on a separate line than the dart from drogheda to malahide but then what happens. Does everyone get off the Belfast train onto the dart at malahide or does the train continue on the dart line into connelly. Forgive me I'm not overly familiar how the dart and mainline trains work now, I imagine it's on the same track?
 
All pie in the sky

Unless we get real about infrastructure planning and implementation. And it is not a question of money, we have money enough for these projects but they will bogged down on planning, appeals and judicial reviews, etc, etc

Why would you expect anything different?
 
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