Portlaoise - Portarlington Closed

[Mark Gleeson]

Incident involving 17:30 Portlaoise Heuston, emergency services on scene

17:00 Dublin Cork, stuck at Portarlington
17:05 Dublin Tralee, was stuck at Monastervin but now moving towards Portarlington, believe currently parked in a passing loop outside Portarlington to allow 17:10 Athlone/Westport + 17:30 Galway to overtake to get onto Galway line
17:25 Dublin Limerick is at Kildare, overtaken at Kildare by 17:30 to Galway
17:30 Dublin Galway between Newbridge and Kildare, waiting on several trains in front to move
17:20 Dublin Portlaoise is overtaken by the 17:25+17:30 per timetable so is behind the 17:30
17:35 Dublin Waterford has departed Kildare, 9 minutes late, no further delay expected

[Mark Gleeson]

All Dublin Portlaoise services now operating to/from Kildare only

[Mark Gleeson]

Due to the nature of the incident we are looking at least 1 hour possibly more before the line will be back open

[Jamie2k9]

bus shuttle between Portarlington and Portlaoise for the 17.00 and 17.05 services.

They also seems to be allowing Cork passengers in Heuston transfer tickets to tomorrow.

[Kilocharlie]

IE Twitter very busy tonight with lots of updates and replies to tweets. Some complaints of lack of on-board information though.

[laoisfan]

Originally Posted by Kilocharlie

IE Twitter very busy tonight with lots of updates and replies to tweets. Some complaints of lack of on-board information though.

I was on the 5:05pm Tralee going to Ballybrophy.

The train driver was brilliant, providing us with information as soon as he could provide it. When we were allowed to pull into the platform at Portarlington we immediately boarded waiting buses to Portlaoise. On arrival at Portlaoise we boarded a train which already had the 5:00pm Cork passengers on board already, a bit crowded, people standing, understandable though.

To be fair to Irish Rail they handled it very well. They have no say on opening the line, I believe that is up to the emergency services and/or the police.

Got home at 9:12pm but who cares. I made it home tonight, plenty of other people will too, one person won't though. RIP.

[Mark Gleeson]

Given the circumstances it could not have been handled much better

1. On train communication was as nearly always a problem on many impacted services

2. No notice on Irish Rail's website

3. No communication of a clear plan

There is one option that was not considered, slight crazy but would have got folks home earlier, couple the 17:05 & 17:25 services and run to Athlone, Athenry, Gort, Limerick.

While it is a sensitive subject questions must be asked as to why it takes 5+ hours for the emergency services to deal with an incident like this. Consistently it takes 2-3 times as long to sort out an incident on the Heuston routes vs the DART, where 2 hours at most gets things running again

[Inniskeen]

This was a difficult incident for all concerned which was going to cause heavy delays even if there happenned to be a fleet of buses sitting in the car park at Portarlington.

While each incident is different it is not entirely clear that the current generic approach is in the public interest. Obviously the first priority is delivering any possible assistance to injured parties and a dignifified recovery of remains. If this takes five hours then there is nothing that can be done.

On the other hand if hours need to be spent with measuring tapes and form filling then I think this needs to be done while traffic is maintained with trains being cautioned through the area.

[James Howard]

There seems to be the same pattern with road incidents. I think one of the issues that every case needs to be treated as a potential manslaughter case so they have to be very careful about gathering evidence.

That being said, it should be possible to do it more quickly rather than keep several thousand people delayed for several hours. It's the usual problem with Ireland lack of joined up thinking. The guards are probably saving a bit of money by cutting back on resources for the investigation team yet Irish Rail will be faced with shelling out of the order of a hundred grand in compensation for a single incident.

[Jamie2k9]

This was a difficult incident for all concerned which was going to cause heavy delays

While I fully accept this I think the period of closures are becoming longer and protocol needs to be reviewed as the UK can deal with such incidents at similar speeds (100-125) around the 2 hour time frame and to be honest if such prolonged closures took place regularly over there it would go to Government level to be addressed.

IE did a great job however would be interesting to know how long they waited before they started looking for bus transfers. if it wasn't immediately then maybe its something they should do once they know why the line is closed as it's unlikely to reopen given past experience.

[Kilocharlie]

Originally Posted by Jamie2k9

IE did a great job however would be interesting to know how long they waited before they started looking for bus transfers. if it wasn't immediately then maybe its something they should do once they know why the line is closed as it's unlikely to reopen given past experience.

First mention of the incident on twitter was 5:53. Several tweets from 6:47 mentioned they said they were working to arrange buses but that this was difficult on a Fri eve peak. By the sound of the tweets, they had been trying for some time, with difficulty, to source buses. By 7:22 buses to be at Portarlington soon.

There were 100's of tweets that evening.

[Mark Gleeson]

Incident occurred approx 17:35