[MrX]

I was on the Cork-Dublin train at 15:30 yesterday and there was a "Cu na Mara" coach mixed into a standard IE Mark 3 set.

While the Cu na Mara / international coach was indeed a bit more spacious it suffered from extremely poor lighting. The interior of the coach was so dim that it was difficult to read a newspaper. All of the lights seemed to be working so I can only assume that it is some kind of a design flaw or that IE had a dimmer activated!

Overall, I didn't like the coach much at all. The windows are *WAY* too heavily tinted for Irish weather, the interior seemed dull and grey and dead compared to the MK3s. The automatic carriage end doors were very narrow and difficult to move luggage through. The luggage racks were tiny.

The toilets cubicals were darkly coloured and generally not very nice.

It also seemed to have features from the older MK2 fleet. i.e. the lighting arrangement looked similar, the air conditioners seemed to be at either end of the luggage racks etc.. Ugly riviting / screws all around the windows etc

To top that off the automatic door at one end of the coach wasn't working and the heating was pretty ineffective. There was a noticable draft all the time and compared to the MK3 coaches the temprature was way lower on board.

I can see why this coach type wasn't really the huge international sucess that BREL intended. Sometimes I think that British rail enthusiasts can get a bit carried away with going on about how amazing some of BREL's designs were.

I would reckon that the normal IE Mark 3 stock is vastly superior from a customer experience point of view. They're actually quite pleasant on board and the interior finish and panels are far more "finished" looking. The International/Cu na Mara coach seemed a bit more "screwed together".