According to Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Railway_Corridor), the WRC so far as it has been done has cost €106 million. This is an absolutely staggering waste of money given the length of time this line has been closed.
This is just another symptom of the mindblowing waste of taxpayer's money that has been thrown at Iarnrod Eireann over the last 10 years. I've been commuting from Edgeworthstown for going on 6 years now and the only tangible improvement in the service is that one of the early morning trains is timetabled to take about 10 minutes less than 10 years ago. Some people might find the 22k trains an improvement over the old coaches but it is marginal. They are louder and the seats are harder but the indiviual armrests are nice. Hardly worth over 2 million quid per car.
How can you come up with a service so chronically unreliable after being able to replace all the track (including doubling from Clonsilla to Maynooth), all the signalling, most of the level crossings and all of the rolling stock over a 10 year period. It seems to me that Iarnród Eireann has taken its focus off serving customers and has put it more on delivering projects.
As somebody who spends close to 4 hours per day on trains, I used to happy to see investment going into the railways. But at this stage, I would rather they took the foot off the pedal for a couple of yours and put some effort into operations. It needs to move on from Are you right there Michael are you right.