New Timetable from 9 September.

[Inniskeen]

Originally Posted by Mark Gleeson

Commuters are well known not to able to count (my DART was a coach short etc) so unless someone has a photo of a 2 coach train we cannot comment.

There are certainly 4 coach trains out there, in the original draft timetable there was 7 trains per hour peak and the extra train was to be a 4 coach, that was fine but what has come to pass is a mess

There should be
8 * 8 coach sets (7 Tokyu Car + 1 LHB)
10 * 6 coach sets (LHB)
1 * 4 coach
Total 128 which is the agreed availability from 144, thats up from 122 previously so there are more seats per hour than last week.

The availability target is fairly soft it assumes 2 Tokyu sets our of service (8) and 4 LHB (8),

You need 19 sets in motion to make the timetable work,

If you reverted to the 70 minute running time gets rid of the 4 coach set for no loss but due to compatibility issues you can't run an LHB with a Tokyu car so you can't lengthen anything

Only short term option is to get 2-3 of the unloved Alstom units back

Unless I have missed something, the new timetable requires 18 sets to cover advertised services - not all in motion given that turnaround in some instances is up to 20 minutes (at Bray). There may be a further spare set to cover failures & disruptions. The 0800 from Howth failed (at Howth) today but was replaced (from Connolly) by an empty 8 car set from Connolly southwards. Is this the 19th set ?

There is more than one 4 car set in service - I saw two one after the other at Pearse yesterday around 1700. Likewise today, around the same time, there were two four car sets working through Pearse.

Yes you could probably save one set by restoring Howth/Malahide to Bray journey time to 70 minutes, although turnaround times would be reduced to 5 minutes in some instances.

It is clear that this timetable has disrupted and inconvenienced many more people than it has benefited. The urgent priority should now be the restoration of capacity on key peak period DART trains even if this means abandoning the NTA's vanity fixed ten minute interval off-peak DART schedule.