CITY BOUND:THE EARLIEST Belfast-Dublin morning train habitually includes some of the hardiest commuters in Ireland and is frequently standing room only by the time it reaches Connolly Station.
As passengers got off the 6.50 from Belfast and on to buses at Drogheda railway station, the reality of the disruption caused became real. Ulster Bank worker Liam McConkey’s daily commute from Belfast, a round trip of five hours door-to-door, just got an hour longer and there are no earlier trains to make up the time difference. “It’s an inconvenience, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. I’ll just get into work later in the morning,” he said.
Christina McDermott, who works in a psychiatric hospital, is one of around 50 cross-Border commuters from Newry to Dublin every morning. She gets up at 6.10am to catch the 7.39am from Newry to Connolly Station.
“It’s awful not just with the impact on my working day, but on the time I get home in the evening,” she said.
Fortunately for commuters in Drogheda the first day of disruption occurred in August at the quietest time of the year with many people on holidays and the schools still off. It also helped that it was a fine sunny morning and commuters were not forced to wait in wind or rain for buses.
A fleet of buses was waiting for commuters at the station yesterday leading to restrictions in the number of car parking spaces available for commuters.
It took just four minutes to load up all the passengers from the Belfast-Dublin train.
Drogheda is one of the busiest commuter railway stations, carrying 1,500 passengers each way every day.
An Irish Rail spokesman at Drogheda said the company had erred on the side of caution in providing more buses than were needed for the first day of disruption. “We over-engineered it a little bit so that nobody was left behind. People seemed to come a little earlier than normal and that has helped the situation.”
Commuters were pleasantly surprised at the length of time it took for the buses to reach their destination.
One person who took the 7.16am commuter train from Dundalk to Dublin Connolly got a bus at Drogheda at 7.40am and arrived in Connolly Station at 8.40am, just three minutes after the train would have been scheduled to arrive.
Local TD Fergus O’Dowd, who was at Drogheda station
yesterday morning, said rail commuters who travelled by bus at 7.30am from the station took just 45 minutes to reach the centre of Dublin via the Port Tunnel.
“I would give full marks to Irish Rail. They showed very efficient organisation and precision-like timing in getting these buses loaded so quickly,” he said.
“The real test will come when the students go back to college and the weather gets worse and it is cold and dark outside, but it has been a good start.”
Mark Gleeson of Rail Users Ireland also said bus services had proved to be faster than train services from Drogheda, but he said the situation for commuters from Balbriggan had been “messy and awkward”.