I love trains. No, really, I do. In these pages, I have written about all manner of things that move you from one place to another, including cars and scooters, buses and bikes. But as much as I obsess over transportation forms, I have not yet written about my favourite \u2013 the train.<\/p>\n
There are many great things about trains, chief among them being that a train is a reflection of the place where it is run. Tell me how a country runs its railways, and I will tell you what that country believes about itself, because the building of a train is too long, too expensive and too public to reflect anything other than the institutions that built it. Consider Japan, where the fastest trains on Earth were built by the slowest, most deliberate people imaginable \u2013 a nation that will rake a gravel garden into symmetrically straight lines every morning. The bullet train resolves that contradiction at 300km an hour \u2013 the fastest train in the world, built by the slowest culture in it. The fastest slow train there is.<\/p>\n
Then there is Switzerland\u2019s<\/a> Glacier Express, which does the opposite, declaring itself the slowest fast train in the world \u2013 eight sluggish hours to cross a couple of hundred Alpine kilometres, the slowness being the entire selling point. Then the Orient Express, which should not be confused with the Glacier Express; sharing its luxury with Switzerland and which tells you everything about old Europe. Its passengers prefer the idea of travel to the actual arrival, and it is built for those who would pay extortionately to jostle through the night, dressed elegantly for a place they have no intention of reaching<\/p>\n And then there is the best train of all \u2013 the ghost train of Pyongyang.<\/p>\n For decades it was believed that the North Korean metro was entirely fake \u2013 that it was little more than two chandeliered and marble-pillared train stations placed a hundred metres underground, populated by well-dressed \u201cextras\u201d who boarded one carriage, rode in a loop, and stepped off again; entirely staged for the benefit of the few foreign tourists allowed to see it. These \u201cextras\u201d were supposed to give the idea that the country was surviving \u2013 nay, thriving \u2013 and that people with jobs had places to be, reaching such destinations on expansive infrastructure. <\/p>\n North Korea\u2019s train sits somewhere between an underground gothic ghost story and a Wes Anderson set, with its commuters who may or may not be actors; the whole transportation system whirring around in an opulent propaganda of tourist trickery. All of which makes it an underground version of The Truman Show: a fake world staged for a handful of outsiders allowed to see it. The first irony is that the Pyongyang train would be the socialist reply to a film about capitalism; and the second irony, that the film was about surveillance, a subject on which North Korea already excels.<\/p>\n Except that the ghost train was not fake, it was real. With 16 stations and half a million riders a day, all supported by a ticket costing half of one American cent. The train is a genuine, working and comically cheap metro. And because tourists were only permitted to visit two stops, they conspiratorially assumed the rest did not exist. The smallest fake train in the world turned out to be the deepest real one. Deep, because the metro stations double up as nuclear shelters, of course.<\/p>\n Which brings me to Ireland. Did you ever hear about the golf train?<\/a> No? Well, it is Ireland\u2019s answer to North Korea \u2013 which is to say it is the exact opposite of it. Pyongyang built real train stations that seemed fake. In Ireland, we are building a fake train station that will, for a brief period, seem real.<\/p>\n When the Ryder Cup<\/a> comes to Adare Manor<\/a> in 2027, roughly a quarter of a million visitors will pour into a small Limerick village whose railway station closed in 1963, a tragic casualty of the country\u2019s decision to bet the national infrastructure on the future of cars. So today, Irish Rail is conjuring a train station back into being, by building a \u20ac3 million platform long enough for eight-carriage trains, complete with a shuttle running outside all normal timetables, bringing visitors a brisk walking distance to the gates. The construction is happening alongside works to reinstate the Limerick to Foynes freight line, which is expected to be complete in October 2026.<\/p>\n The Adare to Limerick Junction service will run for roughly a week, as there are, the company confirms, no plans to keep it.<\/p>\n