Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 24 January 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Capital Projects and Operations: Iarnród Éireann
Mr. Jim Meade:
Yes, absolutely. The fleet ultimately will be electrical. It will come with some sort of mechanical propulsion in the short term but in the long-term it will have the capacity to go 25 kV AC. That is what we are working towards, namely, a fully electrified hourly service with a reduced journey time. It will take all these factors into being.
On the ticketing side, there are two different ticketing systems and I happen to know that Translink has just started to look at its ticketing system to see if it can bring it more in line with Irish Rail's ticketing system. Currently, it works but it must be manually worked at several levels across the business. The all-island review, which we mentioned earlier and which was published for public consultation last September, came back with quite positive commentary. Even those comments that appeared negative were actually comments looking for more services. They were not against the proposals; they were simply saying that we might not have considered this or that. All the feedback went to the Department for Transport and it is working through that at the moment. It hopes to publish in the near future. It has not set an exact timeline but publication by the Department of the all-island review should be reasonably imminent. This will identify all the key projects to be done over the next 20 to 25 years. From an Irish Rail perspective, we will identify the short-term wins and go through a process of identifying short, medium and long-term projects. Short-term projects are projects over the next five years. Some of these short-term wins are programmes Irish Rail already has in play. Others are programmes we have put forward that are not yet funded but once the strategic review supports them, it will then make sense to advance them.
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