For the past 10 years I have been travelling on the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise express up to four times every week. It is with genuine relief at the end of a hard week of cross-border cooperation that I collapse onto the homebound train from Newry to Dublin with a cup of tea or a can of stout and The Irish Times.
It’s not a bad service – it’s certainly a far cry from the dreadful days of the early nineties when bombs and bomb scares, usually in South Armagh, used to lead to extended bus trips around the back roads of the Carlingford peninsular that could add two or three hours to the journey.
But it’s not a good service either, certainly not for a train that is supposed to provide a high-speed link between the island’s two major cities. Most Enterprise trains take 125 or 130 minutes to do the 113 mile journey, with four stops. Earlier this month I experienced the real pleasure of travelling on the new train from Malaga to Seville: it takes just 115 minutes to make this 160 mile journey (with three stops) linking two cities which are smaller than Belfast and Dublin. And this is just a regional train: it doesn’t travel at anywhere near the 220 miles per hour that the major inter-city AVE expresses between Madrid and Seville and Madrid and Barcelona reach.
Improvements in the Enterprise in the past decade or so should also be put into historical context. I stand to be corrected on this, but a railway history enthusiast told me recently that Belfast-Dublin on the fastest non-stop Enterprise today takes just five minutes less than it did 61 years ago in the age of steam (and just a year after the service was first introduced)!
We in Ireland have benefitted from the resurgence in rail travel everywhere in Europe. The new Dublin-Cork train, with its average speed of 58 miles per hour (it is 49 mph on the Belfast line, largely due to speed restrictions north of the border), its comfortable compartments and computerised seat booking system, is a great improvement on what went before. The introduction of new trains on the Sligo and Waterford lines, where services had been almost ‘third world’ in their shabbiness and unreliability, saw traffic increase by 15% and 11% respectively in 2005-2006. In the North smart new Spanish (again!) railcars have made rail travel attractive for the first time for many decades, with the result that passenger journeys increased by 12% in 2008.
But the Enterprise, refurbished with new rails and rolling stock back in the mid-nineties, has once again stood still and even gone backwards. The once smart French carriages are looking increasingly shabby; the American engines have always been temperamental. Annual passenger numbers, which reached more than a million in 2003 and 2004, have now dipped to under 800,000.
Meanwhile the time it takes to drive from Dublin to Belfast has been getting shorter as the road improves. When the new Newry outer ring road finally joins the new stretch of dual carriageway south of Banbridge, there will be a modern highway all the way from Dublin Port Tunnel to Belfast’s Westlink, and – traffic permitting – car journeys of well under two hours will become possible. As University of Ulster economist Dr Michael Smyth says: “If it takes less time to drive between the island’s two cities than to go by train, there is something radically wrong”.
This was also a point made by the IBEC-CBI Joint Business Council in a submission to the North/South Ministerial Council in November 2007. IBEC and CBI worried that with car journeys along the MI corridor, which runs parallel to the rail line, rising by 85% in the 10 years up to 2006 (and this was long before the avalanche of Southern shoppers descended on Newry, Lisburn and Belfast), the number of cross-border trips was growing strongly but the railway’s share of them was being eroded.
The Joint Business Council also expressed concern about the Enterprise’s reliability, pointing to long delays of up to and sometimes more than an hour. “Unless these problems are addressed quickly, the service will lose the confidence of users.”
At a time when railways in other European countries are increasingly seen as a competitive and environmentally sustainable form of passenger transport, this decline in the island’s premier rail service simply does not make sense. But with the onset of the recession it is not going to change any time soon. A 2008 submission by the North’s transport company Translink estimated that a new hourly service, with a new track alignment to facilitate 140 mph trains to reduce the journey time to 75 minutes, would cost £1.5 billion. A more modest hourly service to bring the journey time down to 100 minutes would cost a mere £200 million. However in the present economic climate not even this is going to happen. It looks as though the limit of any foreseeable modernisation will be the refurbishment of a few carriages and ‘business as usual.’
Andy Pollak
Hi Andy
Myself and my other half went on a mini-break to Belfast about a year and half ago. Belfast was lovely and good craic. However the Enterprise was, in our view, a total rip-off for the price of the tickets (about 50 euro each as I recall) for what is quite a short journey. We were booted onto a bus – for no good reason – at Dundalk on both the journey up and back. We speculated there must be a financial incentive for the train company to do this. Cheaper to run a bus than a train after all? We felt we should have been offered a refund on part of the ticket price. It certainly turned what should have been a short, comfortable journey into a bit of an (expensive) trial. It would be interesting to know is this a regular event. Also the train back was not the cleanest e.g. most loos out of order. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to repeat the ‘Enterprise experience’ to be honest even though there is much to entice me back to Belfast. Orla
Dear Andy I read your latest note with interest. Indeed the Dublin to Belfast train line is in need of an upgrade. That said, I would draw your attention to the state of the train line between Derry and Belfast. Woeful is the only way to describe the 2 hour 40 minute ( on an Good) day journey. The seats are filthy, there is no provision for snacks or refreshments and the temperature of the rail carriages flutuates only above feezing when the doors open at stops. I have spent many a journey with a dark coat under my bum – because of the filthy seat and a blanket wrapped around me as I waited to get home for the weekend. Even the slowest Ulsterbus service beteen Derry and Belfast, on a busy Friday takes 1 hour 50 minutes and no longer. I assume you will lobby for the upgrade of the Dublin to Belfast link but don’t forget those of us who love rail and would love a much improved service between Belfast and Derry.
For the first time in two decades I recently took the Enterprise. My experience of rail travel in Ireland has not been good, I’m afraid. And it hasn’t got any better. Apparently first class is OK – but I was with the polloi!
I was so looking forward to the “Ulster Fry”. Unhappily, this merely showed my age. I had the choice of bad instant coffee, bad instant tea, and some sort of plastic bread roll in a plastic container. I declined all three, and had breakfast in Belfast.
Speed, service and cost are significantly better pretty much everywhere else in Europe where English is not the official language.
On the other hand, once they get Newry bypassed, and the road works around Belfast finished, driving there will be a pleasure.
Eoin
As an infrequent but enthusiastic user and a London-based Irishman, I must agree with all that has been said about our own dear “Enterprise”. It has served us since ?1948? (with newish rolling stock every few years) and unlike the now crack Iarnrod Eireann (IE) Dublin HeustonCork expresses, it is showing its age. Most of the De Dietrich French carriages are at least 15 years old. For techincal reasons, the GM locos are unable at times to easily pull that French stock and have to be regularly rotated (so sometimes you dont get the green Enterprise liveried engines up front). And at times the loos aboard leave something to be desired. We need joint Translink NIR(TNIR)/IE action to lobby the respective transport depts. More stock would allow a few non-stop Dublin Connolly Belfast Central as well as the current limited stop services. Better track also would help. TNIRs useful special occasional web-based deals (always day trips only and always only Belfast->Dublin->Belfast) with much reduced return fares (sometimes only UK£ 10) are great value. We need IE to do the same at their end (obv in Euros).
best wishes
David Lally
Belfast-Dublin centric mindsets – what about the North West peripheral region. As a member of the Into the West Railway Lobby Group I have been campaigning with others to secure investment in the rail link from Belfast to Derry/Londonderry and into Donegal – once the county with the highest rail network in the UK. Investment in the Galway Ceannt Rail Station, investment in rail in crucial to developing balanced regional economic and social development.
High speed services are appearing everywhere in Europe and across the world.
Imagine a high-speed channel tunnel from Dublin to Birmingham, via Snowdonia? See tourism and industry explode in places like Dublin, Blackpool, Liverpool, Birmingham, Shefield etc.
Not so hard to beleive. In south England recently, opened high-speed train lines from London St Pancras to Europe travel at 186 mph. The new trains travel through Kent to the Kent coast, through the channel rail link to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam etc, taking less total journey time than by plan. In Japan the bullet train probably tops them all on speed.
Travel, tourism and industry would benefit and it would create 1000′s of jobs. How private/public funded thats how?