Keeping Irish Rail on the right track
The rail company has been through dark times but its CEO is looking ahead to a greener, bolder future, writes Fearghal O’Connor
IRISH Rail chief executive Jim Meade has good news and bad news for the train company’s current and would-be passengers. Train services are going to get more comfortable, more frequent, more electric and more green — just not quite yet.
Stepping through a discrete door off the crowded and noisy Platform Four of Connolly Station, Meade leads the way down a quiet corridor with intricate plaster cornices from the 1840s, past a sweeping Downton Abbey-esque staircase and into a stately office that has housed generations of railway managers since the golden age of steam.
At times in the past decade, Irish Rail, with its financial crisis and trade union battles, has seemed like an exercise in managed decline. But all of that has changed. Services are now packed, sometimes too packed. Big engineer-led plans are being drawn up and the company is, unapologetically, tapping into the climate crisis to haggle for the money that it needs to fulfil its expansionary ambitions.
When it comes to the turnaround of the business in a short space of time, the numbers do not lie. “Nationally, we are growing very well,” he says.
Meade, a quietly spoken but straight-talking engineer, joined the rail company as an apprentice fitter in 1979 and was appointed CEO in May 2018.
Corporate recovery at Irish Rail may have more to do with national economic recovery, but the numbers have all been going the right way since he stepped into the top job.
“It’s only five to six years since we were carrying 35 million passengers a year. This year in 2019, we will top 50 million passenger journeys. And we’re basically still running the same fleet that we were running in 2013. So that in itself is a success story, but it has also brought the issues of very busy trains and capacity on trains front and centre,” he says.
Those numbers have translated into a very badly needed revenue boost to about €230m this year, up from €160m five years ago. Just a few years ago, the financial situation for the State’s rail company was deeply troubling. Locked in an industrial relations battle, it had warned the Labour Court in 2017 it was “nearly insolvent” and pay rises for staff could leave it trading recklessly.
Meade says: “We’ve come through the crisis. But we’re still not in a position that we can take major shocks. So the funding model is sustained and in a good place, but we have to be careful that we don’t do anything that would upset the balance.”
The new-found calm is thanks in part to the successful agreement with the Government of the first five years of a €197m-per-annum long-term funding plan, to maintain rail infrastructure.
He says: “It takes several years of this type of funding to bring it back up to a steady state. But for our passengers, ultimately it means no speed restrictions, no ‘clickety click’. If the quality of the infrastructure is brought back up, then the use of it can be more intense.”
On December 1, the company is also due to sign a new 10-year €150m-per-annum contract with the National Transport Authority (NTA) for the provision of services across the rail network.
Meade hopes that by the end of that 10-year period, Irish Rail’s services will be greatly expanded.
But is the State getting good value for this combined €350m investment into rail each year?
“Absolutely,” says Meade. He points out that nobody factors in the cost of providing road infrastructure when assessing the economic success of a bus service. “We’re getting good value when you compare to the cost internationally of operating rail services,” he says.
Passengers, of course, are increasingly vocal about the fact that trains are more and more packed, and at busy times uncomfortable.
“Our trains are very busy,” says Meade. “Capacity at the peaks — morning and evening — is certainly a challenge for us. The morning peak in particular. Standing is a daily feature of any commuter network in any major city, but the risk for us is that without new fleet over the next couple of years, we get to the situation where people can’t physically get on. We haven’t started leaving people behind us yet but capacity on trains is becoming more limited with each passing year.”
Meade’s key concern now is how to carry 75 million passengers per annum by 2025. In the coming weeks, the company will place a long-anticipated €150m order for 41 new rail carriages to carry 20,000 extra passengers on commuter routes in the busy morning peak. The bad news for commuters is that it will be two years before these new carriages begin to arrive. Meade, however, defends the delay.
“There’s a long lead time on new fleet with manufacturers and two years is actually very good,” he says. “Normally, it is three or four years.”
Neither does he believe that the publicly funded rail carriages could have been ordered any sooner.
“It’s a delicate balance for us to understand whether we’re seeing one busy year or if passenger numbers will continue to climb. We didn’t want to be in a situation where we found ourselves with lots of fleet sitting idle. It’s a balance we always have to try to achieve. We’re spending public money so it’s important that due diligence is done, and that we spend it wisely and astutely.”
If the 41 carriages that will be ordered in the coming weeks are a sticking plaster for the company, a second longer-term ordering process to purchase 600 carriages over a 10-year timeframe for about €900m is the measure of Irish Rail’s ambition for the future. “This will allow us to order batches as we see passenger numbers grow and if we see numbers beginning to level off, we can wait to take our next batch of new carriages,” he says.
But just as important to the future direction of the company, says Meade, is not how many carriages it plans to order but what type.
With proposals for electrification in the planning stage on key lines, most of the 600 carriages will be electric rather than diesel. The initial 41 carriages will be diesel hybrid, meaning that they can adapt to electrification as it rolls out.
“The big thing for us is electrification. We just see such value in that for the country’s climate action plan, as well as meaning cheaper trains to buy and cheaper trains to run and maintain.”
Under the Government’s Project Ireland 2040, €2bn has been set aside for DART expansion to double the overall capacity of trains serving the greater Dublin area. Plans are ready to electrify out to Maynooth, Hazelhatch and Drogheda.
On the busy Northern line, it is currently examining the possibility of four-tracking it as far as Malahide, which would allow hourly services to Belfast taking just 90 minutes, Meade says.
Planned improvements to track layouts around Connolly Station — including a new Platform Eight — will attempt to free up the key city centre bottleneck. Of course, many transport experts would argue that the real solution to that congestion problem is still gathering dust on a shelf: the DART underground interconnector tunnel that has been consistently shelved by governments.
First proposed in the 1970s, it would join Heuston Station by tunnel to the north docklands, via Christchurch, St Stephens Green and Pearse Station, fully integrating the transport network. It is not on the agenda before 2027 but, says Meade, it is the ultimate goal.
“It’s not gone. It was always a good plan. The €2bn expansion does a lot of the component parts needed to deliver it and the route for the interconnector is being identified as part of this.”
He adds: “As we start ordering trains and as we get those three routes electrified, 80pc of our journeys will be taken on electric trains. That would be a step-change for our whole carbon footprint.”
The company has also begun talking to the ESB about this future electricity requirement and Meade hopes that, ultimately, it can all come from renewable sources, reducing Irish Rail’s carbon footprint to close to zero.
Meade says that freeing up capacity in and out of Dublin will have a very positive impact right across the network. For example, plans are under way for an expansion of commuter services in Cork, with up to eight new stations. There is also potential for local commuter services in both Limerick and Galway.
“The move from diesel to electric will be as big a move for us as the move from horse-drawn carriages to steam. We will look back on this five or 10-year timeline as a huge step-change.”
Previous incumbents of Meade’s vast highceilinged office could only have dreamed of such optimism. “We went through a few years where the finances were very, very tight. We were in constant contact with the Department of Transport and the NTA around the funding model. The farebox had dipped off so it was a perfect storm.”
But now Meade sees huge potential for growth as the company provides new capacity.
“There is a latent demand out there, particularly on the main corridors — the Kildare corridor, the Maynooth corridor, the Northern corridor.
“The best example is the new Phoenix Park tunnel service to Grand Canal Dock. It started with a small number of peak-time services and we didn’t advertise it so we could iron out any glitches first. But it was a victim of its own success. To this day we haven’t advertised it and within months the trains were full. We did a survey on board hoping maybe 20pc of customers would be new to public transport. We were pleasantly surprised to find it was 50pc. That’s the ultimate goal, to get people on to our services who are currently driving.”
Meade has a simple philosophy: “The railway is here since the early 1800s. And one thing is for sure, it was here before me and my management team and will be here after all of us. Our goal is to make the railway better and more efficient and we have the baton for a generation or two. We need to hand that baton over with it in a better condition than when we got it. That should be our objective.”