At 7.12am every morning, Emma-Jane Murphy takes the first train out of Connolly station in Dublin city centre to Skerries in north Co Dublin, where she works in childcare.
For the first few months of the year, that worked reasonably well. She disembarked the train at Skerries a little after the scheduled time of 7.41am. An electric scooter brought her the rest of the way.
Even after October 7th, when Irish Rail banned electric scooters, she had just about enough time for the 12-minute walk to work, barring delays.
Since the summer, however, Irish Rail’s timetable has become so unreliable that Murphy and thousands of similar Irish commuters can no longer trust the trains to get them to work on time.
“It can be quite stressful. Sometimes the train can be delayed by 20 or 30 minutes, usually in Malahide, and quite often they don’t tell you how long it’s going to be,” Murphy said.
To make sure that the creche has the required ratio of staff to children, any delay means Murphy frequently has to make alternative arrangements on the fly to ensure the team has enough cover.
During a major signal failure in May, she had to pay €80 to get a taxi to work, and more recently she’s had to call on her parents to collect her at the station and give her a lift. She knows such a solution is not ideal. “They have to get up early and they’re both retired,” she said, but she has no other options.
[ Readers have their say: ‘There has not been one day without delays on the train’Opens in new window ]
Murphy is not alone. A survey of readers by The Irish Times found a huge volume of stories of commuters struggling to navigate an increasingly unreliable rail network, with reports of signal failures, mechanical issues, operational difficulties, delays and cancellations more than daily occurrences.
Take Sorcha Morrissey, who lives in Clongriffin and commutes daily to Maynooth, where she works for a financial services company.
“I started the job at the end of July, when Irish Rail was still on the old timetable, but then they changed to the new timetable – it was chaotic,” she said.
It’s roughly a 50-minute journey, with the first leg on a Dart from Clongriffin to Connolly, where she changes for the second leg by commuter train to get her to Maynooth by 9am.
When the trains were running smoothly, she could leave at 8.25am and still have plenty of time to get to work. But delays mean she has to leave Clongriffin on an earlier train, and even then, she is often late.
The impact is just as significant on the return journey, she said.
“What is very annoying about the timetable changes is that the Maynooth train back to Connolly leaves earlier now, so quite often I get into work late in the morning and I have to leave earlier in the evening.”
Ethan Elliott from Wicklow said that throughout this year he has seen the service “consistently degrade”.
He now presumes “at minimum, a 10-minute delay to what is advertised as the arrival time of the train”. Even then, that’s frequently insufficient, he has found.
The signalling centre in Connolly station dates from the 1970s, and it was extended in the 1980s to Dart. But it is outdated, it is on its last legs
— Mark Gleeson of commuter lobby group Irish Rail Users
Those stories are borne out by Irish Rail’s own published punctuality figures, which show a dramatic decline over the last six months.
In June, Dart services had a punctuality rating of 92.8 per cent, which declined to 91 per cent the following month, then to 83.6 per cent in August, 75.4 per cent in September, and a low of 64.5 per cent in October. They have increased slightly in November to 69.3 per cent, but it’s still equivalent to three in every 10 trains missing its target time.
Northern commuter services have shown a similar slide, as well as Phoenix Park tunnel and Heuston commuter services. Virtually every train coming into the Dublin area has experienced a large month-on-month drop in punctuality since the summer.
The question is, why?
According to commuters and experts, it appears Irish Rail is in the midst of a perfect storm: there are more rail users than ever using services at different times, putting the network under stress at different times, while an ageing fleet of trains is running at full capacity and the network’s signalling system requires replacement.
“Part of the issue is that half of the Dart fleet is 40 years old, and most of the breakdowns in Dublin are Darts,” said Mark Gleeson, a spokesman for Irish Rail Users, the commuters’ lobbying group.
While there are no safety issues with the trains, even a small fault, such as a failure of a door in a carriage, will require a train to be taken out of service. This has major knock-on effects for the rest of the trains on the timetable, which usually cannot be clawed back to normality once a delay has occurred.
“We’re a two-track railway so there’s nowhere to pull in. If there’s a train breakdown in Germany or France, they have four tracks, so they can shove all the trains down the other tracks,” said Gleeson.
Then there’s the issue of the rail signalling system, which has been the subject of a number of significant breakdowns in recent months.
“The signalling centre in Connolly station dates from the 1970s, and it was extended in the 1980s to Dart. But it is outdated, it is on its last legs, and it is woefully undersized for the tasks it is meant to conduct,” Gleeson said.
Irish Rail has known for more than a decade that the signalling system “is inadequate to cater for current demands”, as the company’s annual report put it as far back as 2012, while the board was still discussing the “obsolescence” of the system in 2019. There’s a more modern replacement facility in Heuston Station, but it’s not due to be up and running until 2026.
Signalling system problems have become particularly intrusive in recent months, most notably on November 28th, when a large signal failure froze trains coming in and out of Dublin for hours.
[ ‘I feel Irish Rail are just running down the time and hoping I will go away’Opens in new window ]
Laura Farrell, who lives in Swords and travels once a week by train to Blackrock, was one of the thousands of commuters affected.
She heard the announcement about the signal failure at about 7pm, so walked out to the street to catch a bus, as Irish Rail’s announcements had advised.
“I figured maybe I’ll try to go down the Howth Road and try to get one,” she said, but she found the buses were jammed with passengers ordinarily on trains.
She spent an hour trying to catch a bus with no success, then discovered through social media that the signal failure had been resolved, so made it back to the station by about 9pm.
“I was waiting for 10 minutes on the platform for the train going to Howth, then the announcement came that the signalling was gone again,” she said.
Eventually she got back to Malahide by about 10.10pm; what would normally be a one-hour commute took four hours.
The problems, according to Brian Caulfield, a professor of transport at Trinity College Dublin, are symptomatic of a lack of investment in Ireland’s rail infrastructure over the last few decades – a problem that has become particularly acute because of the high volumes of people using the rail network.
“We’re using the network more than we used to, and if you put that kind of pressure on any type of system it can result in faults happening,” Prof Caulfield said.
Irish Rail’s figures show there were 38.5 million passenger journeys across the network in 2022, rising to 45.5 million in 2023. By some estimates, this could rise to more than 51 million this year.
“It’s like trying to fit a size 12 foot into a size 10 shoe, and cracks are starting to appear because of underinvestment,” Prof Caulfield said.
Multibillion euro investment is required in the rail system, he said – not just for overhauling the trains and signalling systems, but in new tracks – both light and heavy rail – and in electrification of large portions of the network. The necessary investment will not be cheap or fast, he added.
“The best time to build anything is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now,” he said.
Irish Rail spokesman Barry Kenny acknowledged that “the period since late August has been an extremely challenging one in terms of punctuality for our customers, for which we apologise, and assure customers we are working to address”. He blamed a numbers of factors.
“The revised timetable was not operating well, and had a far more disruptive effect on northern commuter services in particular than anticipated,” Mr Kenny said.
The rise in commuter numbers after Covid and the traditional delays caused by winter weather were also factors, he said, and such “force majeure” issues account for almost 40 per cent of delays.
On the signalling system, he said there had been “two particularly severe faults”, but that there was “no underlying issue” and that the system was “managed and maintained”.
Upgrades to both the fleet of trains as part of the new Dart+ programme and the new National Train Control Centre were “well advanced to help both capacity and performance”.
Plans for expanding to a four-track line between Connolly and Malahide would allow for trains to be better managed, reducing potential congestion going into the busy Connolly hub, which is “hugely important to keep up with demand” as the population in the Greater Dublin Area increases, he said.
The journey is probably about half an hour longer, but it’s more consistent. I know the time I’m going to get in at
Nonetheless, he conceded that “longer-term, the congestion on the busiest corridor north of Connolly will remain a challenge”.
That will prove to be a challenge for many commuters too.
Elliot in Wicklow has already made the change to abandon the uncertainty of the rail network and to embrace his electric car, which will clearly add to road congestion. Nor is such transport particularly convenient for him.
“The journey is probably about half an hour longer, but it’s more consistent. I know the time I’m going to get in at, barring an accident,” he said.
[ Rail disruption hell: ‘There has not been one day without delays on the train’Opens in new window ]
Others have no other choice. For Morrissey, travelling to work from Clongriffin to Maynooth every day, the train is her only option currently.
“I’m learning to drive, but even if I was driving I wouldn’t want to drive on the M50,” she said. “The train is my only option.”
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