economies up the left anyway, lets get some Japanese lads to come over and build us a grand High speed rail system connecting the whole country even Donegal. and as the money is going down anyway lets build a 2 tunnels to england and france a underground rail in belfast dublin and cork
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would most prolly be the most useful investment for the next few hundred years.
I think your joking, but it really annoys me how the vast majority in this country have no idea about how high speed rail works.
In a country the size of Ireland a high speed track from Dublin to Cork or Limerick or Galway could have only one or max two stops along the way
There is a heap of old railway lines interconnected throughout the country that are abandoned and unused. So they already own the land.
just upgrade it all have a mega rail system.
I want a bullet train from wexford to Dublin.
Get me to work in 20 minutes rather than a two hour drive.
It wouldn’t be feasible to build a tunnel to France. How would you ensure safety if the train was stuck in a tunnel that is hundreds of km long? Even a tunnel to Britain would be tricky.
Edit: I’m not sure why this was downvoted as it seems pretty logical. If you could reply we might be able to discuss it.
Best train ever ! I was lucky enough to go to Japan years ago and OMG!!! The trains are just so good!
It’s time Ireland ask for some help to other countries coz they can’t do much by themselves, lest be honest
I’d settle for the train from dub to wex not taking nearly 3 poxy hours when driving takes less than 2.
11 seconds to cross the country
yea …fuckit…lets do a Mars mission
Donegal to Wexford in less than an hour
I’d love to see a bullet train here.
It’d be a beautiful thing to build but the only winners out of this will be the wig and gown wearers. This will be like fucking Wimbledon with all the time spend popping in and out of courts
But Ireland is where good things go to die. Nothing that works anywhere else in the world can be made to work here. It just sort of dissolves
Grand job I’ll throw a fiver into the bucket.
Said thing is years ago a Japanese company came over said they would build a metro for a pound/euro. And they would run it for ten years after it was build too make money back or some of it. Our morons in government said no. This was before we where starting work on the Luas.
Ireland is way behind where we could be in terms of our rail infrastructure. I don’t think we have the physical distances required to make full fat high speed rail worthwhile. But we could probably make high quality “[Higher Speed Rail ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail)” work. This would be a mix of upgrades to existing lines plus new alignments to have speeds somewhere between 160 and 200 km/h. For reference the UKs new HS2 line is to be rated for 350 km/h running which is the cutting edge of modern full fat high speed rail.
Running at 200 km/h would actually make travel times to most of the island in under 2 hours feasible from Dublin and if you run express non stop services to Belfast or Cork you could likely do them in an hour or 1.5 hours
The big thing we need is capacity. We need the main inter City lines double and quad tracked and improvements to signalling to allow shorter headways. Which along with higher speed rail would allow us to run more trains. It would allow express services to overtake stopping trains and it would also allow freight to operate with minimal interference with passenger services
In terms of the actual network coverage our network is sadly lacking. As a basis of where I would like the network to go I would start by connecting the main cities (Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Derry) which even then would start to provide good coverage across the island. I would then look to ensure that key secondary towns are connected (the likes of Waterford, Dundalk, Sligo, Athlone, Tralee, Kilkenny, etc).
And also the main airports Dublin, Cork and Shannon ought to be connected to rail as a matter of priority. Kerry Airport could also be connected along with improving the Tralee line. While Knock Airport should be part of any west coast main line. I would actually reroute the main Dublin Belfast line south of Drogheda via Swords and the airport which would leave the existing line via Malahide for the DART exclusively
High speed rail seems like an elaborate luxury on for a country the size of Ireland when Dublin doesn’t have a metro and Limerick and Cork don’t have any commuter rail.
Tunnels seem cool though a bridge to Scotland makes the most sense.
Lets start from a motorway from Limerick to Cork that can’t get through landowners objections for longer than Reddit exists.
Not as crazy as it sounds
Great idea, they should all be green and called “Duck-billed Paddybuses”.
Yes! Train supremacy. Let’s use politicians wages to pay for it
Japans economy has been in the toilet since 1992 (look up 1980s Japanese bubble era sometime, makes the Celtic Tiger seem underwhelming) and they still manage to build this stuff.
Just throw up a few zip lines along the electrical grid and we would be zipping around
I would definitely use speed train from Cork to Dublin. If it will cost like now – 50 eur, but travel only 1.5 hours – it will be way, way better than car. But I think we can only dream about it. 🙁
Central hub in athlone and a rail going around the wild Atlantic way around the coast and up the other side to Dublin airport and then up north. Like a wheel, have spokes coming out of athlone to the coastal stations by way of big city’s like limerick cork Galway etc etc
They always say there’s no demand for buses to small villages and villages but if it was there you can be sure people.would be down in lahinch and kilkee and cliffs of mother every other weekend if there was an infastructire to get there and was affordable.
Went from Florence to Milan on high speed train for like 12 euro recently and that train went on to places like Rome and Naples afterwards apparently. I’d be gone every weekend if the rates were affordable.
> Even Donegal
Careful now
Why a tunnel? Why not a bridge like the one from Hong Kong to Macau?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge
A Japanese company offered to build a subway system and the port tunnel for nothing, they wanted the ticket sales for the following forty years, our government rejected the proposal and then spent six billion on the tunnel out of tax payers money, never built the subway system and then charged the people for using it.
If we can afford a 200 billion handout to the banks we can afford a long-term investment into the infrastructure of the country.
Those things are expensive…. OPs plan would cost trillions. Even connecting Cork, Dublin and Belfast would cost hundreds of billions. Japans can afford them as their population is 25 times ours at 125 million.
You’ll have lost points for including England
The Japanese actually did offer to build an underground system for Dublin for the cost of operating it for thirty years. This was back in the 80s.
The government of the time turned them down.
It’d be too expensive. You could build half a Children’s Hospital for the price!
I’d settle for a simple Luas line from the city to the airport at this stage.
> even Donegal
Woah woah pump the breaks there! Can’t have them folk up there thinking their entitled to things like public services.
If they did this you could actually live outside Dublin and still work there. Thos would alleviate the pressure on houses a bit too.
Ya won’t get nothin unless you straight up “Great Replacement” every local NIMBY between Cork and Belfast.
I know theres a lot of talk about the dublin metro, but urely it would be more beneficial to the country to spend the money on the national railway network rather than the metro.
Queue the drips that crop up each time with the old chestnut, “But the demand just isn’t there”…
I would sell my left nut for a sub 1hr trip from cork to donegal