industrialheritageireland.info

Following on from the €50m IT fiasco, Irish Rail is embroiled in another scandal. The Journal reports that fuel storage facilities owned by Irish Rail at Connolly Station are believed to be leaking into the River Liffey with all the negative consequences that this entails.

This has shades of the problem uncovered in 2019 where ESB power cables were leaking oil into the Grand Canal in Dublin.

I spotted this notice on the side of the ticket machine at Kilcock station last week.

In a rare outbreak of common sense in Ireland, Irish Rail is encouraging those who are not feeling well to alight from the train and await assistance at the nearest station, which (cue all the haters), IMHO, is a better outcome than holding a train at a station waiting for assistance to arrive for 1 passenger.

The London Underground has had similar signs at their stations for years and I am pleased to see Irish Rail is starting to follow suit.

I normally work on the basis of not believing anything government related until it has been officially denied by RTE or the BBC.

Having said that, in a rare act of explaining something in simple English, RTE has a very good article explaining why electricity costs in Ireland are the highest in Europe.

TLDR, electricity is more expensive in Ireland due to:

• Higher costs generally, which then feed into supplies/staff costs/taxes etc borne by electricity providers
• Higher wages/salaries in Ireland relative to other countries
• The size of Ireland’s grid.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this last one mentioned as normally, anything that implies that the proliferation of one off housing in rural Ireland comes with a price tag is deemed to be the elephant in the corner of the room and is not talked about or, worse still, its existence is denied.

RTE reports that Irish Rail have written off €50m spent on a failed IT train management system. Maybe if IR were to show the same zero tolerance towards its own behaviours as it does towards the public, there would be a better result.

In 1994, in his capacity as Minister for Enterprise & Employment, Ruairi Quinn introduced the May bank holiday in the Republic of Ireland, to take place on the 1st Monday in May each year.

As a result of this, I was able to spend yesterday and today photographing the railway lines from Collooney to Claremorris (yesterday) and Claremorris to Athenry today.

In the case of latter, in addition to re-photographing the stations, I also visited most publicly accessible bridges and level crossings, the reason being that the noise around the potential restoration of all (Athenry to Claremorris) or part of this line (Athenry to Tuam) is getting louder.

As such, these photographs will form a record of the line before any such restoration takes place.

With 200 images taken over the 2 days, it will take me a while to process and upload these to the site.