Irish Rail pays €60,000 to customers in compensation for late trains

More than €60,000 in refunds was paid to Irish Rail passengers for trains that ran at least an hour late over the past 18 months.

The €60,136 in compensation was paid to 2,493 people, at the rate of about €24 per claim made.

Figures from the rail operator show that a total of 294 trains were at least 60 minutes late since the beginning of last year.

There were delays of more than two hours on a further 27 services, according to figures released under Freedom of Information by Irish Rail.

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In the first half of this year, eight trains were delayed by at least 120 minutes, with five of them on the Belfast line, one on the western rail corridor, one on a commuter service from Heuston and another on the Sligo line.

There were 95 delays of between 60 and 120 minutes logged this year, with a sharp rise in June when there were 52 one-hour plus delays reported.

The services with the highest number of these delays in 2023 were the Belfast line (16), services to Galway (13) and the Northern commuter line (12).

Overall, delays of above 60 minutes were rare with a total of 120,553 services run between January and June and only 0.09 per cent of them at least an hour late.

The service with the greatest issues around punctuality was the Belfast line, where 0.82 per cent of services – or about one in every 120 trains – departed 60 minutes or more after their advertised time.

Last year, there were 199 trains that were delayed by at least an hour and 19 services that were hit by delays that exceeded two hours.

The highest number of one- to two-hour delays were on the Cork-Dublin route (30), the Belfast line (37) and the Maynooth commuter route (22).

Of the 19 two-hour-plus delays, five of them were on trains serving Cork, four on the Dart, three to Galway and three to Rosslare in Wexford.

A spokesman for Irish Rail said: “Thankfully, it is only a tiny proportion of our services which experience delays which result in compensation refund vouchers being applicable – just 293 out of almost 370,000 train services which operated in an 18-month period. “Our passengers’ charter provides for refunds for delays of 60 minutes or more, and we would remind customers to avail of this should they face such serious disruption for any reason.”