Mr. Richard Logue:

I thank Deputy Calleary. I have been involved with the Into the West rail campaign, so we are very aware of how the estimates from Translink and Northern Ireland railways come about. The model Translink used made several assumptions about increasing the passenger capacity on the line if further trains were run. It is safe to say that once the new timetable was introduced, and especially when the new trains were brought on stream, Translink put a lot of effort into promoting the promotional fares. For instance, there is a very cheap fare on Sundays right across Northern Ireland. The model Translink used to put together the original estimates when it did the internal business case for further investment came out way below the actual figures. It estimated it would reach around 1 million passengers by the end of the second year but it reached that point six months in. I would have used that service myself for many years. My family are from Donegal and I used that train for several years in the past when it was a rattly old diesel engine. There would be six people, including me and the driver, on that train coming out of Derry.

It is a different situation now. There is a regular clock-face timetable so people know the train is going to leave at a specific set of hours of the day. There are very good quality, air conditioned trains. They have recently introduced walk-through trains on that line as well. Customer demand outstripped what the managers predicted.

One of the big things we hear from Irish Rail and the National Transport Authority is that they run a railway census every year. The NTA tends to run it in a middle week around November. They are looking at the minimum number of passengers who might board those trains. It is worth pointing out that this is a tactic used by Richard Beeching when he was chairman of British Rail back in the early 1960s. He used the idea of the censuses as a stick to show how lightly used certain lines were. The other issue is that when services started to reopen after the Covid restrictions, people were already complaining about overcrowding. That has shown there has been more demand. A key point that Mr. Mulligan raised very well is the slowness of, for instance, the Sligo trains. Those trains are running on speed restrictions, which dampens down demand.

I will hand over to my colleague, Mr. Stacpoole, to follow up on further questions Deputy Calleary raised.