One thing you can't complain about with Irish Rail. A UK equivalent commute to Longford - Dublin is Peterborough - London which costs nearly 6 grand sterling before you add tube costs. And they don't have taxsaver in the UK.
If you look at it another way, a 3.4k ticket form Longford ends up costing about 1.7k after tax. If you take the approx 2 million cost of a railcar and divide that by 60 (for a 22k), you get about 33 grand for the price of a seat. So just to pay the capital cost of the seat excluding interest, labour, maintenance, and fuel, it would take about 20 years to pay it off.
I love a good moan about Irish Rail when it comes to punctuality or level of passenger information, but you can't really complain about the prices for commuters.
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