Sir, - Dalkey is north-east of Blackrock, according to Irish Rail's new DART map. Given the company's grasp of geography, I shouldn't have been surprised to pay nearly £5 for a return DART ticket from Greystones. The same ticket from Bray, just one station closer, costs half that.As a car owner I have the luxury of choice, and my 11-yearold gas-guzzler can get me to Bray for a fraction of the premium levied on Greystones passengers. There are other reasons for choosing Bray: it has a full DART service, Greystones has an occasional one. Considering the amount of money handed over to Irish Rail by the Government and the EU for the DART extension, I wonder why this premium is necessary. Perhaps it is to cover the cost of the £8,000 bonus paid to each DART driver, which they demanded in order for them to grant their company permission to hire staff for the new extensions.Ignoring the cost difference, there are other reasons why I am reluctant to take the DART from Greystones. Recently I stood in a queue stretching all the way down the street for 20 minutes to buy a ticket. When I got to the front of the queue, the 8.04 to Malahide sounded its horn to tell us it was leaving. Now it seems to be the practice in Greystones that when there are people queueing for tickets and the train is about to go, the ticket collector allows people still queueing to board without a ticket. But not this time. The ticket collector told me I could not board without a ticket, and that I would have to wait for the next one (which was over an hour-and-a-half away). Luckily, the passenger behind me pushed him out of the way and a stream of over 100 people behind him in the queue piled on to the train without a ticket anyway.It irritates me to hear spokesmen from Irish Rail hail the DART extension to Greystones as a success story. There are clear problems. They do not have enough staff or carriages to cope with the number of people currently using the service from Greystones. Every morning there are passengers standing on trains leaving Greystones - the first stop on the DART. The last three times I purchased a season ticket, I explicitly asked for a ticket that would serve Greystones, only to be told later by an inspector that my ticket only took me as far as Bray. And to top it all off, we pay double the amount for an incredibly inferior service.So it's back into the car for me, to watch the same stream of cars leaving Greystones head for the congested car parks of Bray, while the multi-million pound park-and-ride facility in Greystones stays vacant of cars for yet another day. - Is mise,Tadhg O'Brien, Hawkins Lane, Greystones, Co Wicklow.