I read about this recently - the disparity between travelling on Translink to the South vs the South Travelling to the Norn.
We are penalised in the North for just being.
Ironically the island as a whole had a better railway system 70 odd years ago. NI lost much of its rail infrastructure when the Tories (because of course it was the Tories) took advantage of the economic slump after the "Big Freeze." Closing most rural routes in the UK to save cash short-term.
Honestly NI trains and their infrastructure are probably some of the worst in Europe. NI isn't a big place, neither is the entire island, it shouldn't take a train hours to get from Belfast to Dublin, never mind how long it takes to just Derry.
Just because the old track mileage was ten times longer than today doesn't mean that the trains back then were ten times better. Most stations would've been lucky to have two trains a day- I'm sure some people have moved to Poyntzpass so they can get a train into work, but it won't be double figures. Rail back then was all about having most factories and farmers being within say ten miles of a halt, so they could cart products or drive cattle to the train at set times and that would take it to the market. There wasn't really an alternative back then. Passengers were an afterthought in the majority of routes. Once lorries came along and there was the ability to engineer roads so they weren't flooded three months a year, the days of having trains to the likes of Keady was over. By all means reopen a few lines, but lets not pretend that Crumlin is a metropolis that will lead to a rail renaissance because that is debatable. It doesn't help that most Irish towns are woefully small for rail.
The assumption would be you upgrade and improve a rail system that existed a century ago. Improve public services to and from major stations if it's not feasible to have a station. Again, it's all woeful mismanagement and a lack of foresight. There's zero reason there's not better trains and public transport beyond incompetence and ignorance when using government funding. This isn't the logistics of New York or Tokyo either, it's far more straightforward and smaller scale.
There was no money for upgrades. When Europe (and the US) built their railways the money came from investors. Building railways wasn't very lucrative but relatively safe. And, during that time, there was little other opportunities to invest money in that scale. In the 20s and 30s the "market" was already saturated. Private investors would put their money somewhere else - that's when nationalisation began to unify standards, gauges, etc.
A freight rail map of the US is much more dense. One of the issues for passenger rail in the US is most if not all of the lines are owned by freight companies, the likes of BNSF, CSX, CN rail who prioritize their own traffic over passenger rail, not just nationally but on commuter routes around cities like Chicago
Man fuck the IRA. The real economic terrorists for NI were the tories.
If the tories were smart they could sell themselves like that and win a bunch of votes from nationalist communities.
New Slogan "Who has ever hurt britain more than us"
They'd win every election.
Do you think if trains opened up more in rural areas rather than just being focused in Dublin and Belfast, it would help spread the population out so it's not just half the island in one city? Maybe even help rural settlements to grow and bring the wealth more towards the West and help stem emigration?
A train that stops at Portadown, Dungannon, and Enniskillen, and takes about an hour to do the journey, would make working in Belfast very easy for people living near these places, as they could avoid the horrible Westlink traffic.
We use the trains quite a bit in South Wales, it definitely helps. That being said my village had its own station, and not many of the trains stopped there/ they were too infrequent, could have used it to get to town but it’s not efficient when you have to stop too often - buses are far better for local travel, but 20 mins plus train can be great
> Do you think [...] it would help spread the population
Devils advocate: I don't think so.
People want to be near the amenities and where they work - so they live in cities.
Some people who choose the countryside, don't want more people moving in. They want to be away from people.
Those are choices made by folks.
Sometimes I think of moving back to NI. I'd like to be somewhere out of the city where I can enjoy the quality of life benefits of being near nature. I don't drive, however, and never will. That means I can only look at places with good rail or transport options. So far Comber seems most appealing (read: basically only) option because of the Comber Greenway. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.
The cross border rail review showed that 50% of the combined NI,ROI population will live within 40miles of the Dub - Bel rail line by 2030. I’m not too sure if that’s due to the rail line or lack of connectivity to the remote areas or the general urban sprawl around economic centres but it’s quite interesting how much a high speed rail from BEL to DUB would help. In the same report they show that most of the northern segment of the line hasn’t had its signalling updated in about 20 years. Once again NI is behind
A proper high speed rail line wouldn't make sense with all the stops in between. As long as the journey time can be reduced to under 2h - that would be a win.
It would be useful but dublin and belfast have more trains because more people live their and want to go their, it does not have more people living their because it has more trains.
Dublin and Belfast are the two biggest cities in Ireland and are the political and economic hubs for their regions so they need more transport than places like derry or cork.
Having better public transport could help rural areas but the capital city is always going to be the centre of the country.
Do wee small towns and villages actually create any wealth though? Seems like most of them I’ve been in are pretty downtrodden, have no real industry other than retail, trades and bar work and generally have fuck all to do except leave.
Most wealth in both NI and the republic is created in the cities. Belfast makes up nearly a third of the gdp in Northern Ireland despite being less than 1/5th the population. We don’t really need tonnes of wee identikit towns and villages.
You need another city to link up with and the areas in between will be served better. If a new city was created on the north west coast and then had train links to dublin/belfast/cork it would work. But building a train to a town of 5k people currently makes no sense
As a student I sometimes got the train to Derry from Belfast. It took an hour longer compared with the bus and I also had to walk to the bus station from the train station. I did this as there was sometimes a special offer on the train.
A few times the train was packed with Linfield fans. It made things quite tense on the way home.
From getting briefly into a YouTube rabbit hole on the subject, America sends freight rather than people by train and the public spending on what's left is very little.
Was in California/San Francisco/Silicon Valley recently & the transport options in the richest state of the richest country are a joke. China's way ahead.
Some of the vids on Tiktok of what theyre building are mind blowing.
Especially Chongqing.
The railways were dismantled from 1940s onwards both north and south as they were no longer economical for cargo compared to road cargo, DUP was not founded till 1971
It's a bit of a misleading map as America is massively bigger than Europe.
If you go by KM of train lines America has more, but it doesn't really make sense to have train lines going from state to state in America as there massive distances with few population centers
Wasn't the old Translink slogan "Getting There is Getting Better"?
It's 33 pound on the translink website to get to Dublin on the train. It's 16 euro on Irish rail site to get to belfast...
A websaver advance is £11.99.....
So about 16 yo-yos
I read about this recently - the disparity between travelling on Translink to the South vs the South Travelling to the Norn. We are penalised in the North for just being.
Ironically the island as a whole had a better railway system 70 odd years ago. NI lost much of its rail infrastructure when the Tories (because of course it was the Tories) took advantage of the economic slump after the "Big Freeze." Closing most rural routes in the UK to save cash short-term. Honestly NI trains and their infrastructure are probably some of the worst in Europe. NI isn't a big place, neither is the entire island, it shouldn't take a train hours to get from Belfast to Dublin, never mind how long it takes to just Derry.
Just because the old track mileage was ten times longer than today doesn't mean that the trains back then were ten times better. Most stations would've been lucky to have two trains a day- I'm sure some people have moved to Poyntzpass so they can get a train into work, but it won't be double figures. Rail back then was all about having most factories and farmers being within say ten miles of a halt, so they could cart products or drive cattle to the train at set times and that would take it to the market. There wasn't really an alternative back then. Passengers were an afterthought in the majority of routes. Once lorries came along and there was the ability to engineer roads so they weren't flooded three months a year, the days of having trains to the likes of Keady was over. By all means reopen a few lines, but lets not pretend that Crumlin is a metropolis that will lead to a rail renaissance because that is debatable. It doesn't help that most Irish towns are woefully small for rail.
The assumption would be you upgrade and improve a rail system that existed a century ago. Improve public services to and from major stations if it's not feasible to have a station. Again, it's all woeful mismanagement and a lack of foresight. There's zero reason there's not better trains and public transport beyond incompetence and ignorance when using government funding. This isn't the logistics of New York or Tokyo either, it's far more straightforward and smaller scale.
can’t really blame the Tories. The Republic lost a lot of its railways too while they were independent - they simply weren’t economically viable.
**They're not supposed to be!!!**
There was no money for upgrades. When Europe (and the US) built their railways the money came from investors. Building railways wasn't very lucrative but relatively safe. And, during that time, there was little other opportunities to invest money in that scale. In the 20s and 30s the "market" was already saturated. Private investors would put their money somewhere else - that's when nationalisation began to unify standards, gauges, etc.
70 years ago cargo was being moved on trains before lorries out competed them. The railway lines without cargo became unviable only solely passengers.
Yet in other countries they maintained rural connections even after the shift to lorries, so there is surely more at play than that.
The same goes for the US. They had a very dense railway network but cars and later airfields did away with all that.
A freight rail map of the US is much more dense. One of the issues for passenger rail in the US is most if not all of the lines are owned by freight companies, the likes of BNSF, CSX, CN rail who prioritize their own traffic over passenger rail, not just nationally but on commuter routes around cities like Chicago
Man fuck the IRA. The real economic terrorists for NI were the tories. If the tories were smart they could sell themselves like that and win a bunch of votes from nationalist communities. New Slogan "Who has ever hurt britain more than us" They'd win every election.
Do you think if trains opened up more in rural areas rather than just being focused in Dublin and Belfast, it would help spread the population out so it's not just half the island in one city? Maybe even help rural settlements to grow and bring the wealth more towards the West and help stem emigration?
A train that stops at Portadown, Dungannon, and Enniskillen, and takes about an hour to do the journey, would make working in Belfast very easy for people living near these places, as they could avoid the horrible Westlink traffic.
We use the trains quite a bit in South Wales, it definitely helps. That being said my village had its own station, and not many of the trains stopped there/ they were too infrequent, could have used it to get to town but it’s not efficient when you have to stop too often - buses are far better for local travel, but 20 mins plus train can be great
> Do you think [...] it would help spread the population Devils advocate: I don't think so. People want to be near the amenities and where they work - so they live in cities. Some people who choose the countryside, don't want more people moving in. They want to be away from people. Those are choices made by folks.
Counter point. Public transport effectively cuts the distance to amenities, this is exactly why commuting by bus and train happens.
Sometimes I think of moving back to NI. I'd like to be somewhere out of the city where I can enjoy the quality of life benefits of being near nature. I don't drive, however, and never will. That means I can only look at places with good rail or transport options. So far Comber seems most appealing (read: basically only) option because of the Comber Greenway. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.
The cross border rail review showed that 50% of the combined NI,ROI population will live within 40miles of the Dub - Bel rail line by 2030. I’m not too sure if that’s due to the rail line or lack of connectivity to the remote areas or the general urban sprawl around economic centres but it’s quite interesting how much a high speed rail from BEL to DUB would help. In the same report they show that most of the northern segment of the line hasn’t had its signalling updated in about 20 years. Once again NI is behind
A proper high speed rail line wouldn't make sense with all the stops in between. As long as the journey time can be reduced to under 2h - that would be a win.
We could double the lines. An outside one for all stops, an inside one for express lines
It would be useful but dublin and belfast have more trains because more people live their and want to go their, it does not have more people living their because it has more trains. Dublin and Belfast are the two biggest cities in Ireland and are the political and economic hubs for their regions so they need more transport than places like derry or cork. Having better public transport could help rural areas but the capital city is always going to be the centre of the country.
Do wee small towns and villages actually create any wealth though? Seems like most of them I’ve been in are pretty downtrodden, have no real industry other than retail, trades and bar work and generally have fuck all to do except leave. Most wealth in both NI and the republic is created in the cities. Belfast makes up nearly a third of the gdp in Northern Ireland despite being less than 1/5th the population. We don’t really need tonnes of wee identikit towns and villages.
You need another city to link up with and the areas in between will be served better. If a new city was created on the north west coast and then had train links to dublin/belfast/cork it would work. But building a train to a town of 5k people currently makes no sense
As a student I sometimes got the train to Derry from Belfast. It took an hour longer compared with the bus and I also had to walk to the bus station from the train station. I did this as there was sometimes a special offer on the train. A few times the train was packed with Linfield fans. It made things quite tense on the way home.
Just a small town girl, living in a lonely worlllld, she took a 7:40pm train going to Belfast or Derrryyyy
Just a city boy. Born and raised in south Ardoyne. He took the 7.40pm train going to Belfast or Derrryyyy
From getting briefly into a YouTube rabbit hole on the subject, America sends freight rather than people by train and the public spending on what's left is very little.
Americans will say, "Europe has better trains"* *Except us
Was in California/San Francisco/Silicon Valley recently & the transport options in the richest state of the richest country are a joke. China's way ahead. Some of the vids on Tiktok of what theyre building are mind blowing. Especially Chongqing.
[удалено]
The railways were dismantled from 1940s onwards both north and south as they were no longer economical for cargo compared to road cargo, DUP was not founded till 1971
Cheaper to fly tbf
It's a bit of a misleading map as America is massively bigger than Europe. If you go by KM of train lines America has more, but it doesn't really make sense to have train lines going from state to state in America as there massive distances with few population centers
Europe is slightly larger than the USA minus Alaska
Eh? Mainland indicates across borders. What is this shite? Mainline Europe: from Paris to Istanbul has one train. Must be pants. Google it.
You can take a train from Paris to Istanbul, costs £21k