NTA awards contract to consultants to advise on improving the punctuality of trains in the Dublin area

David Gibbons was having a cigarette on Monday, at the first-floor entrance outside Connolly Station, on his way home from work.

He said he’s an electrician for Intel and he commutes by rail – changing trains part way– about five days a week. Some days he drives, but rarely.

Gibbons says the trains are often enough a few minutes late. “It’s always been bad,” he says. 

The main problem is when the first train is late then he misses the second. It makes him late for work, and he gets his pay docked. “You have to clock in, clock out,” he said.

He showed a picture of what caused his commute to be delayed one day: three horses, two on the tracks, one on the platform, with no apparent owner nearby.

He pulled up the audio of the conductor announcing the delay: “Once again, there’s horses on the track. This train will stay until the horses are removed from the track.” 

For the last few weeks he said they’ve been on time, Gibbons says. “They seemed to improve lately, like, for some reason,” he says. “So I’m happy enough at the moment.”

Although things may have smoothed out in recent weeks, Irish Rail was in the news last autumn as trains ran late day after day. 

“Some of the changes initially made in August 2024, while designed to add more capacity to services – ultimately had a detrimental effect on punctuality of our services,” an Irish Rail spokesperson said. “Revisions made subsequently have seen punctuality recover significantly.”

To take another stab at improving the system, the National Transport Authority has awarded a contract to consultants WSP, for €500,000, to review rail services in the Dublin area, “to advise on a range of potential short-term measures that could improve the punctuality of services”.

But Mark Gleeson, spokesperson for the Rail Users Ireland, says the problems are already known. "Can we stop, please, with commissioning more reports and actually just fix what we already know is broken?"

“The National Transport Authority love to commission reports, but action on what the report tells them to do is limited,” he says. “And I think that's what commuters on the ground want to see is less talking and more action.”

Reviewing to improve

After a new rail timetable was introduced, “a number of operational issues were encountered”, the Irish Rail spokesperson said. 

“In the Connolly area in particular, where track congestion is an issue given the large volume of train movements,” he said.

“These issues were subsequently rectified,” he said. “However we are committed to learning the lessons and ensuring we can do better in the future.”

For the first half of this year, reliability on most routes – whether trains ran – was near 100 percent. Punctuality ranged from 75 percent to 99 percent, depending on the route. 

Irish Rail looks forward to working with the National Transport Authority (NTA) and its consultants on the upcoming review of train services around Dublin, according to the Irish Rail spokesperson. 

The NTA thinks “it is useful and important to peer review our approach to managing the network”, an NTA spokesperson said.

But Gleeson, of Rail Users Ireland, says Irish Rail already has plenty of data and experts who can see what the problems are in their daily work. 

What's missing isn’t analysis, but funding, permission, and urgency, he says. 

The problems

Gleeson rattled off a long list of the issues he says cause delays on Irish Rail services.

First of all, the timetable isn’t robust enough to handle anything other than perfect conditions, he said. “It assumes perfection. And the system isn't perfect.”

“If anything gets delayed, the sequence is broken, and you get trains crossing in front of each other, and that was the real problem back in August, September, October, November,” he says. 

“Once things got delayed, the whole thing just domino[ed], and it became — it would run away. It all went very wrong. Massive delays. And everyone was unhappy,” he said.

Personally, he would scrap the current timetable, and start from scratch, he said. But people get used to their commute, that wouldn’t go down so well, he said.

In addition to the timetable, the physical infrastructure also needs improvements, Gleeson says. 

At the centre of the congestion in Dublin’s railway network is Connolly Station. It’s a bottleneck for DART, intercity, and commuter lines, Gleeson says.  

The layout, which now handles a much larger flow of traffic than when it was designed, leaves little room for error, he says. 

The infrastructure, including bridges, signalling, and the control centre, is also aged, Gleeson says. 

Some signalling in the greater Dublin area date back to the early 1980s, an Irish Rail spokesperson said. While other parts of the signalling system are from the 1990s, 2000s, or as recent as 2018, he said.

The Central Traffic Control centre, which coordinates most of the national rail network – but is being replaced – still relies on the same basic system it did in the 1980s. 

“It’s like a time machine,” Gleeson says. “There’s phone books holding up the monitors, the air conditioning barely works. It’s dark. It’s cramped.”

He says he wants people out in hi-vis with shovels and equipment fixing the physical problems that disrupt the system, he says.  

“This unicorn experience where it’s going to be this perfect, amazing solution, where it’s going to cost nothing and fix everything — that seems to be the NTA strategy,” he says. 

“And then they get a consultant report telling them, actually, no, it’s going to take a long time and be expensive. We already knew that. We just lost 18 months waiting,” says Gleeson.

“Just do something,” he said. 

###What’s coming

Big changes have been promised for a while, and some of them are progressing, albeit slowly.

A new National Train Control Centre (NTCC) has been built behind Heuston Station. 

Irish Rail is “currently implementing” this centre “and associated Traffic Management System (TMS)”, an Irish Rail spokesperson said. 

“There will be a phased migration of the network from September 2025 and through 2026 to this new centre,” he said. “The NTCC and TMS will play a crucial role in optimizing and enhancing the operations of train services.”

Gleeson says he thinks this will help the trains run on time more often. Instead of having humans make decisions when there’s a conflict in the system, and deciding which train goes next, the computer will figure it out, he says. 

Meanwhile, the DART+ programme is expected to double capacity on the greater Dublin rail network and start to roll out next year.

They also said, the first 185 – of up to 750 – new Dart carriages, which are battery-electric,  are ordered, and set to enter service in early 2026. 

Plus lines like Maynooth and Drogheda are due for signal upgrades, which will the improve safety, reliability, and efficiency of transportation system.

But the DART+ projects are already running years behind schedule, Gleeson says. And, meanwhile, the old infrastructure is having to carry more people than it was meant to.

“We’re expecting more out of infrastructure that was never designed for this demand,” he said. “Back in 1976, nobody imagined the level of commuter traffic we have today.”

Passenger numbers keep climbing. People made over 50 million journeys on Irish Rail in 2024, up 10 percent on 2023, according to the NTA spokesperson. 

That number is expected to rise again in 2025, he said.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.