Iarnród Éireann is to revert to a previous timetable on several routes serving Connolly Station in Dublin – with some minor changes – due to Government and public criticism over punctuality on commuter routes.
The change will come into effect on October 14th.
Issues arose when a new timetable was implemented on August 26th last and the national rail operator said it “deeply regrets” the disruption caused.
An Iarnród Éireann spokesperson said in a statement the company recognises the disruption to “our customers’ daily journeys and lives which have resulted from timetable changes since August”.
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The spokesperson continued: “In accommodating increased services on the Dublin to Belfast route, and managing overall capacity in the city centre area, the changes had a disproportionate negative impact on commuting punctuality and overall journey times, for which we are sorry.”
The company said the introduction of the new timetable will restore morning service patterns, rebalance the timetable to improve punctuality and end-to-end journey times for commuters, while accommodating improved frequency on a number of Intercity routes, including the Dublin-to-Belfast route.
The most significant changes from Monday, October 14th, will be on morning timetables on routes operating to/from Connolly Station (up to 9.30am to 10am, approximately) which will revert to the pattern of the pre-August 26th timetable, with minor time changes.
This includes trains that previously terminated at stations including Pearse, Grand Canal Dock and Bray resuming operation to/from these stations, reducing the need for interchanges in the morning peak at Connolly Station along with all morning Phoenix Park Tunnel services operating to/from Grand Canal Dock.
There will be revised running times on a number of Belfast services, including changes to times on the 6am and 7am Belfast-to-Dublin services, arriving to Dublin at 8.23am and 9.20am, respectively. The company says this will improve punctuality for commuter services as well as reducing a gap in the northern commuter morning service.
Current departure times from Drogheda (with Donabate times for reference) are: 6.48am (7.22am), 6.58am (7.32am), 7.09am (7.44am), 7.41am (8.16am).
New departure times during the same time window from Drogheda (Donabate) from Monday, October 14th will be: 6.55am (7.30am), 7.05am (7.39am), 7.19am (7.55am), 7.36am (8.13am).
Additionally, the proposed 7.50am Dublin Connolly-to-Belfast service will operate at 7.40am, to prevent congestion at Malahide.
Some evening commuter services that currently commence from Pearse/Grand Canal Dock will now run from Bray/Dún Laoghaire.
There will be some minor changes to departure times to a number of Dart, Northern, Maynooth and Phoenix Park Tunnel commuter trains, and one Dublin-to-Rosslare train to facilitate the above.
Increased services on the Galway, Waterford and Belfast lines implemented on August 26th will be maintained while weekend timetables will be unchanged.
Irish Rail spokesman Barry Kenny has acknowledged the company “got it wrong” with the recent planned changes on services on the Dublin-to-Belfast line.
“People build their work, their education, their childcare around their travel with us and we have let them down,” he said on the Claire Byrne show on RTÉ radio.
He said that changes made to the timetable on September 14th did improve the situation in the evening.
Mr Kenny said that the timing changes “were too ambitious”.
Mr Kenny also defended the decision by Irish Rail to send a delegation of 37 officials to a transport trade fair in Berlin. The event covered all aspects of the rail industry in terms of infrastructure, fleet, capital investments, customer systems, he said.
“There is no other place where you will have this scale of industry representation and the particular point at which our projects are. So the people who went to this were primarily the technical specialists and programme leads across our portfolio of capital investments and things like that.”
The people who attended the conference were not the people who would have been co-ordinating the timetable, he said.
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