Sir, – Despite Irish Rail’s glitzy PR campaign, masquerading as “consultation”, advocates of Dart Coastal North should be wary of what they wish for. Quite apart from the proposed emasculation of the Howth service, mentioned by Dr Maria O’Brien (Letters, July 20th), Irish Rail has plenty of other tricks up its sleeve. Notable among them is the way in which a Dart service to Drogheda, with stopping trains running every 10 minutes, will share its tracks with expresses to Belfast (a service already lamentably slow by international standards).
It appears that Irish Rail is putting its faith in passing loops, a system that demands pin-point time-keeping, something that in Ireland happily belongs in the world of fantasy. Does this spell the end of an effective Belfast service, a key element in the development of North-South relations?
Will this too be sacrificed to the holy grail of Dart Coastal North?
If only our erstwhile taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, that well-known aficionado of railway timetables, were here to provide the Government with a dose of railway reality. – Yours, etc,
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ROGER STALLEY,
Sutton,
Dublin 13.
Sir, – Further to “Multibillion-euro new railway lines for Northern Ireland are make-believe” (Newton Emerson, Opinion, July 20th), much of the cost of building a railway is in flattening the land with tunnels, cuttings, embankments and viaducts. Fortunately, this was already completed for us over a century and a half ago on Ireland’s now dormant railways. On routes like those that radiated from Portadown, the earthworks and even some of the bridges are still intact. Even if the £11.5 million per mile cost of reopening quoted by Translink were to double, it would still come out less than the £29 million per mile cost of the recently opened Dungiven bypass. It would also allow people to escape traffic, reduce wear on the road surface, and open up the possibility of electrification with reliable, efficient, and proven technology. – Yours, etc,
EAMONN GORMLEY,
San José,
California.
