Irish Rail, the State owned railway company in the Republic of Ireland, propose to waste a mininum of €380 million of taxpayer's money, unnecessarily installing 2 extra tracks between Cherry Orchard in Dublin and Hazelhatch in Kildare, a distance of approximately 8 miles. Whilst it would be tempting to state that this is due to a desire for big ticket expenditure, the underlying reason is a defective signaling system that Irish Rail is reluctant to replace.
The basic signaling system in use on non-manual lines (CTC) is 30 years old. 30 year old computers are not worth talking about. It is a semi-automated system with a computer supervised by a team of signalmen. Wrong line running is not tolerated for normal operation, due to the complexity involved in supervising such running. This indicates that the problem is the signaling system, not the underlying track layout.
The Kildare Line Project has been proposed by Irish Rail as a "solution" to the problem of their defective signalling system. The alternative (from what I am aware, not examined by them) is a proper signaling system and Up and Down loops at the stations proposed by Irish Rail.
The other issue to be looked at here is the glaring deficiency in all of what they have proposed. The two track bottleneck that will remain between Kylemore Road (end of three tracks from Heuston Station) and Le Fanu Road (start of the 4 track layout). Why would you leave such a problem? The cynic would argue that an inefficiency has been setup in order to justify Irish Rail's pet project, the Interconnecter Tunnel. This is a twin height tunnel to connect the Cork line to Pearse Station via Heuston Station and Stephen's Green. It is a celtic tiger project, i.e., if proposed 5 years ago, chances are it would have succeeded. Now it is a multi billion euro hole in the ground that ignores the new financial reality of the Republic of Ireland and conveniently ignores the existing disused lines from Islandbridge Junction (outside Heuston Station) to Glasnevin Junction (on the Maynooth Line) and from Glasnevin Junction to Connolly Station and the North Wall.
Whilst the two projects are officialy separate, the EIS for the Kildare Route Project has a starting distance point of 7.3km at Le Fanu Road. On its own, this makes no sense. Any reasonable person would start the distance at 0km. To test my theory, I took my GPS receiver and took 4 readings. These were:
Le Fanu Road overbridgeLo and behold, by using basic mapping software to 'join the dots', the straight line distance between these points comes within 100m of 7.3km. On this basis, it is not unreasonable to link the two and see what Irish Rail are doing as a crude mechanism to demand additional investment.
On the pages in this section of my website, I have uploaded a copy of my formal objection to the KRP as sent to Martin Cullen TD., Minister for Transport. I will be taking extensive photographs of the route/features affected and will upload as many of these as possible.
Send me an email: ewan&duffy@g&mail.com (remove the ampersands from the email address, these are included to confuse email harvesters).
Last updated: 5th December 2005
