Platform One for the delayed, overcrowded 18.15 to hell

WHERE TO START with Irish Rail? Why not with the company’s greatest mind trick, the retro announcement?

It goes like this: you huddle from the rain and wait for a train. And wait. And wait. The electronic screen tells you it is due in three minutes. And it keeps telling you that for the next 10 minutes. You ask a member of staff. They know nothing. So you wait some more. Then a different train arrives. You begin to twitch a little at the side of the mouth.

Finally, your train arrives. And then there is there an announcement. It is automated and disjointed and it goes something like this: “The next train on. Platform. One. Is the. Delayed. 18.15 hours service to. Hell.”

Irish Rail has sometimes seemed to be less of a train operator and more of a psychological experiment. Many of its passengers have paid a large amount of money to be the briefcase-lugging guinea pigs, their noses squashed against the window, someone’s armpit resting on their shoulder, as the train crawls along at a speed so slow it can be registered only on a nano scale.

And here’s the thing: I like the train. I was inconvenienced for the three months following the Malahide viaduct’s sudden decision to go scuba diving, and I became a simmering, Fawlty-esque character only five minutes into my first bus journey. When the trains returned, I was prepared to forgive them anything, most notably how the subsequent chaos suggested that Irish Rail seemed to have forgotten that it ever ran trains across that estuary.

When those northern line commuter trains, and the Belfast Enterprise, returned to action, the first couple of weeks gave a fine insight into the efficiency of the Irish Rail. However, it would appear to have had a clever contingency plan – pretend the problems weren’t happening. Those fancy screens that are there to inform passengers of incoming trains? They went blank.

In the meantime, a new timetable had been announced and is now in place. It has not been popular with Rail Users Ireland, a lobby group set up in 2003 (as Platform 11) to rail against what it sees as Irish Rail’s poor customer service. It complains that there are fewer peak-time services on the Dart line and the northern rail line, as well as on the Kildare line; and that Irish Rail has improved some services but diminished others, or continued with unsatisfactory services.

For its part, Irish Rail says it has better spread out the services and that while there may be fewer trains, demand is decreasing.

I can talk only about my own experience, which is of longer journeys on trains even fuller than before. Some of the extra stops are excusable, but the overcrowding is not.

An individual’s train stories, though, are never that interesting to anyone else. Instead, Rail Users Ireland represents a collective frustration that comes not just from being packed daily on to commuter trains and then finding out that they’ll have to squeeze up a little more (having waited a little longer) but from the powerlessness that passengers feel when things go wrong.

There are no Irish Rail representatives in the carriages. There is sometimes only the low crackle of the train driver’s voice, explaining why you are delayed. And if you are late, the last thing you need to do is stop and get things off your chest by ranting at a ticket checker who knows even less than you do.

The EU has recently agreed that train passengers should have the same legal rights as those travelling by air. New regulations on lost luggage, personal injury and refunds are now in force throughout Europe, but not here. The Department of Transport has opted out for five years.

Irish Rail does have a passengers’ charter which guarantees recompense if a passenger is delayed for specified lengths of time, but applying for a refund takes effort that I would guess most passengers don’t put in. It hardly seems worth it for the hope of getting a minor victory over the system and a few euro back. Even then, they come back in vouchers and not cash.

Most commuters, though, are just concerned with getting to work and back without too much angst, but would like a greater sense of control over frustrations they have paid a lot of money to experience.

Irish Rail gets millions from the State before it even adds ticket revenues. Rail users sometimes feel all they have is their quiet rage about a new timetable and strong calf muscles from standing for 45 minutes each way.

Please mind the gap.