Leaf Fall Season
 

With all delays on Irish Rail being currently attributed to leaf fall, perhaps Irish Rail should take a leaf from NIR's book.

Extracted from an article in tonight's Belfast Telegraph

"To date this autumn we have experienced no delays caused by leaves on the line resulting in wheel slip, which is an excellent result for us and our passengers."

The Sandite train (3 class 80s with a sandite carriage in between) has been pictured out and about on several occasions. Perhaps the sanding facilities on the IE stock can't do as good a job?

Irish Rail has several Sandite trains and has a number of automatic sandite dispensers around the network.

Very little evidence that leaf fall has had any impact so far beyond an incident south of Limerick Junction

The Northern Ireland solution to delays is simply not to call at stations when delayed which is hardly a valid solution

According to the IR twitter feed, most delays at this time of the year are due to leaf fall.

And you believe them...

My morning train is as usual 3-4 minutes late every day doesn't matter if its August or November its always the same. On time performance seems to be a function of who is driving and nothing else.

The only point where there has been leaf fall issues in the past there is a sandite dispenser gizzmo before the spot and unlike previous years not a single slip or wheel slide activation so far.

This is a great excuse used every year. The Waterford line is never affected by this as they have cut down just about every tree on the line that loses its leaves.

They used this excuse for a 15 minute delay two weeks ago when it was a signal problem that wouldn't allow any train entre Athy.

got a train home one of the nights during the week and while i was happy with there being no real problems with regards to wheel slip, one of the evenings it took us 2-3 minutes to get from the bottom of the platform to the top! (I was in carriage a) unusual given the problem in previous years was with the train leaving ash town, there were no problems with that aspect!

If that was at Ashown, that happens sometimes because the level crossing isn't closed yet, but the signal protecting is it at the very end of the platform so trains crawl up to it.

This has been a relatively trouble free leaf fall season to date, although Irish Rail continue to wheel out the leaf fall excuse for one operating screw-up after another. Last week was a pretty miserable week for DART and northern line commuter services exacerbated by the additional moves and shunts arising from the North Strand closure.

DART continues to be a really poor performer - travelled to Malahide last night from Pearse. The trip took just short of 38 minutes, an average speed of barely 15 mph which is sadly representative of what can be expected in the evening peak. The miserably slow DART operation is slowly strangling other services which have the mis-fortune to share the same tracks.

Bulk of last weeks problems were down to the Drumcondra closure causing all kinds of problems in the Connolly area

So I can expect my Malahide DART to average 18 to 20 mph next week then !