Its a no brainer that the DART/Maynooth/Drogheda/Kildare lines should have a last train out in the midnight to 12:30 bracket
There is a latent demand for this but a large portion of the potential users complain of a lack of security at trains and stations, thats understandable its a strange experience being on your own in a coach late night, equally you then have the anti social element that is not an isolated issue its a society issue which needs solving. The demand really only exists on Thursday/Friday/Saturday and the late night DART was a total flop there is some work to be done to bring back confidence into the late night use of public transport, we have some thoughts on that.
The big gap currently is the lack of intercity services to Galway, Waterford, Sligo, Rosslare, Westport after 7pm with the advent of the 3 car intercity railcars it should become practical to serve all intercity destinations from Dublin with a train in the 9-9:30 pm bracket. There won't be any reason why and it would cost less than half of what it would to do it today if the trains where available but they are not.
Like Drogheda, Port Loais will gain automatically a late night service in the 11-11:30pm bracket when the maintenance depot opens, thats a given.
This is not a union issue, drivers are required to drive any train 24 hours a day, you only hit problems when its done at say Christmas since it would be outside the planned rosters. The key enabler here is that drivers who live in Gorey/Arklow/Wexford, Carlow, Mullingar etc are recruited and trained (best part of a 2 year lead time on that) or transfered with that in place there would be no need to operate the trains back to Dublin late night empty and back out in the morning so you can eliminate 2 trips which deliver little or no revenue and for no extra cost get a later departure with passengers, still loss making but less so than the current state
Now if someone in Thurles starts to moan about no train after 11 pm, don't get me started....
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