Remember that we are only on the first phase of Kyoto. If we take climate change seriously and really do want to curb carbon emissions, we are going to have to significantly reduce our reliance. This will mean very much reduced reliance on fossel based fuels. This would mean that in addition to much reduced relaince on private cars and air travel, most of our current oil, gas, coal and peat burning power stations would have to go. We will probably see a host of new wind, hydro, wave, tidal and solar schemes, but I can't see us powering 100% of our needs on renewables, even if we become far more energy efficient than we are now, so it's likely that nuclear will be seen as less environmentally damaging than fossil stations.
The alternative is that we ignore the situation completly, and in fifty years we'll be too busy getting to grips with our new coastline to worry about railway lines.
I take Sean's point that you could do HSR of a sort on the current Dublin-Cork line, but you'd have to do a lot of work to take out some of the kinks. It would also be HSR along the lines of the UK's IC125, and even then you'd have to slow down to take turns too tight for tilting stock. You'd also keep catching up with slower local trains. It also wouldn't be much use for connecting to the hypothetical Irish Sea tunnel of this thread. I'm thinking of a new railway along the lines of France's TGV or Japan's Bullet train with speeds of at least 300kph.
I think Maskhadov may be right that the key could be to put new HSR lines in place first. However, we'd have to plan them to connect to Europe from the outset. It would be no use building new HSR lines to Irish gauge. It would be an incredible leap of faith to build new lines to a gauge that's incompatible with everything else in the country. As the lines would have minimal stops, they would more or less have to be built in their entirity before any services could run, and entirely new rolling stock and service depots would have to be purchased.
There was a suggestion that they could be built alongside the existing lines. I see several problems with this. First, these lines tend to go through lots of towns and villages, where space can be very tight. In many cases, adding two extra tracks simply won't be possible, so the line would have to divert around the town, adding speed restrictive bends. Second, many old lines are far too twisty for HSR. Third, they often have level crossings, which the English will tell you are not a good thing on high-speed lines. Fourth, larger European trains tend not to fit on restrictive Irish running gauge, although the entire alignment would have to be signigicantly widened to fit extra tracks. Finally, things would get complicated at junctions. You want to avoid at-grade junctions, so you'd have to build flyovers for standard gauge and Irish gauge lines to cross each other.
I think a new alignment designed to be as straight as possible, with any curves being very long gentle ones, fully segregated on a high-quality trackbed, built to fit full UIC running gauge, with standard gauge track and 25kVAC OHLE, avoiding towns apart from a very limited number of large towns and cities. If property prices keep going up and up the way they have been, it may actually be cheaper to tunnel under some parts than buy land. It's also possible that we'll have new construction techniques by then that will make it affordable.
I would certainly see a big tunnel under Dublin, not dissimilar to the CTRL in London, but it would have to be designed to allow through running to Belfast. The station would have to facilitate customs and immigration and security checks and possibly the loading of cars, and in many ways would be as much like an airport terminal as a railway station. It would be atractive to put it under Stephen's Green or Pearse to maximise onward connections, but that would require excavating a huge underground space. Hopefully by then we will have an extensive Metro network, so there will be some flexibility about its placement.
This is all a very long way off, and Ireland will be a very different place by then. Hopefully some of us will still be around to see it.
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