The ticket office at Sallins for Dublin-bound passengers hadn't even opened when the train pulled into the station. The carriages looked as if they had been deep-fried in slurry. The station timetable made no mention of any such train halting, and the platform extended to only half its length. A few people hopped out onto the platform, and then the train edged up a few extra yards to allow a couple of passengers at the back to get out.
Was this a replacement train for the Arrow service to Dublin? If so, and we didn't get on it, we'd be waiting for another hour. Or was it an entirely improvised stop, on the West Clare railway principle? When I asked the single Iarnród Éireann uniform on the train, his face assumed the aloof, hear-no-evil look of a bishop's secretary as the prelate breaks wind.
So the entire complement of Dublin-bound passengers got aboard. Since there was no one to pay, we didn't. And if anyone wanted to get off at Hazelhatch or Clondalkin, pity, because the train didn't stop at either place. But any anger at that would have been nothing compared with the mood of the passengers. They had been travelling from Westport for well over four hours, and some were softly gibbering in corners.
Tobacco fumes
The single non-smoking carriage was standing-room only: the smoking carriages - whether they were officially so is, of course, another matter - resembled a London film circa 1949, with tobacco fumes wreathing around in oily coils; there was a sense of damp post-blitz despair, social poverty, and ambling through the fog - look! - here come Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.
Except that London trains in 1949 were, relatively speaking, the height of luxury compared with this tubular horror: it was as if filth had been ingrained in the pores of the carriages and furnishings when they were built, and could not have been removed no matter how hard anyone tried. And so, naturally, no one had ever bothered.
By the time the train wound into Heuston station, the Westport passengers had been travelling for five hours. Small wonder that here and there little knots of them were beating strangers to death, while a party of whooping young braves from Kiltimagh began hunting a small porter through the girders on the roof.
Idiotically, I thought the bus would be the quickest way of getting the mile or so to O'Connell Bridge. But the bus took over 20 minutes to fill before departing; and then it couldn't make any progress down the quays because the bus-lane merges half-way along with the main traffic - and a car-driver is more likely to lick his engine-block to death than to give way to a bus which has just overtaken him on a bus-lane, especially if he's been on the quays since last Friday week.
It took the best part of 40 minutes to get to O'Connell Bridge after arriving at Heuston; the best part of an hour-and-a-half after leaving Sallins; fully two hours after leaving home; and all to travel 24 miles. The glories of public transport.
Penal colony
I was ready for my return journey at 4.15, but there was no further service to the Clondalkin-Lucan conurbation - the fastest growing area in all of Europe - until 5.35. Stand on that remote Arrow platform, and you will know how a political prisoner feels as he waits for a train at the penal colony of Npetrovosk to take him homeward after 10 years in exile. A day goes by; two; three. The wind blows. Snows flurry. An old empty samovar clanks as some ancient hinge is teased by an icy breeze. The waiting ex-prisoners stamp their feet. A few slink off to die unobtrusively.
Once in the train, the metaphor changes. Then those relatively colourful Russians vanish. Their place is taken by the whey-faced undead, they who are doomed to spend all eternity corpse-walking into commuter trains, trailing the rank fragrance of the grave.
They fill the compartments, these undead: silent, shrouded, gaunt, with the unseeing eyes that I once thought unique to the London Underground, but which are now standard-issue in Dublin. By departure time, the Arrow resembled something one might find in a Louth meat-packing plant: a steel container, repackaged and relabelled, en route for the starving in the third world, with decaying flesh bulging through every gap in the metal cladding.
No announcements
There were no announcements about what stations we had arrived at; the windows were opaque from the nameless phlegmish vapours emanating from the carcasses within: and the silence of despair which filled the small, dank gaps between people was broken only by the hsss-hssss, thhmmppp-thmmmppp of personal stereo earphones (and that, me lud, was why I done him in).
Yes, yes, I know Iarnród Eireann bids us be patient; that radical transformations are under way, and will require time. But it doesn't take time to put the only station benches at Sallins within the shelters rather than exposed to the elements, as they currently are: for apparently, in the Iarnród Éireann philosophy - ha ha ha - if you're sitting down you deserve to be wet and wind-blasted, and if you're sheltered, you deserve to stand.
Nor does it take time or money to erect proper signposts for strangers to find the entrances to Sallins - or any other - station. What it takes is a modicum of professional care; and that is something the car-driving management of Iarnród Éireann clearly lacks. Which is why, henceforward, I will follow their example: and I too will travel by car.
KEVIN MYERS