Proper rail transport is more vital then ever

IN these straitened times I hope the Government will display courage and vision beyond the next election, specifically by investing in rail transport and in container freight in particular.

We are all aware of the popularity and success of our improved passenger train services — DART and LUAS — but utilisation of capital would be much better if the tracks could carry freight in the off-peak periods.

Trucks have their place for short-haul work and specialised loads, but the days of a man driving a truck with one container from, say, Castlebar to Milan are numbered.

Railways are far cheaper to build than motorways and we already have a fleet of very powerful locomotives, each of which, subject to track standards, could very efficiently haul 50 containers at over 100 km per hour.

This would be much cheaper, faster and safer than having 50 trucks and 50 drivers on our roads and clogging our ports. I believe we should apply urgency to the completion the West Coast Corridor from Rosslare to Sligo, with trucks connecting at the existing terminals and with new terminals in non-urban areas at Athenry and Limerick Junction.

In this way containers could leave the north-west some evening and be loaded onto ships at Cork/Cobh, Waterford-Belview or Rosslare on the following morning.

Within a matter of months the line will be completed from Ennis (and therefore all the way from Rosslare) to Athenry, and hence Galway, with plans to continue to Claremorris, from which it is a relatively short stretch to Collooney on the line to Sligo.

With modern signalling this single-track line could handle considerable passenger and freight traffic at a fraction of the cost of rebuilding the N17.

Many of us have been preaching this gospel for years while numerous governments have poured huge funds into roads, and yet most large Irish towns are plagued with traffic jams.

We did have one Minister of Transport with the required vision, the late Seamus Brennan, but he was sidelined.

In terms of greenhouse gases alone, we do not have much choice — it must be rail — and nuclear power stations, too.

Yet I fear we shall do too little, too late. And on a wider scale we might ask “What is the point?” The increase in the human population is nothing short of catastrophic. As the late distinguished meteorologist Dr Brendan McWilliams wrote last year: “All the signs suggest that the world will fail in its struggle against global warming.”

John McGeorge

Doonbeg

Co Clare