Irish Railway News ‘Enterprise Watch’

[GSR 800]

29 minutes ago, jhb171achill said:

Several points; after decades of conservative rule over thyere, gopvernment investments in any public infrastructure projects is not exactly littered with largesse; and in order to try to counteract conservative votes, like in many other countries, the parties who represented the left are veeriong more and more towards insipid silence, mediocrity, and hand-wringing; witness the Dems in the USA too, who are now considerably mo9re right-leaning than pre-Reagan republicans!

But to stick to the railway theme, the British still are "good" at railways, just perhaps not so much in some areas, though arguably a great deal better in others. None of the preceding posts are really about the railways themselves, or to back to topic, the Enterprise. Ever since railways had to be nationalised some 75 years ago, as a result of not being able to pay their way as businesses, they have been entirely dependent on state funding. Investment in railways, or lack of it, is a matter for a government - be it a British, Irish, EU or Timbuktooean one; rather than a lack of any will or skill within the railway itself. 

A big problem you have is that the state has lost a lot of the wherewithal to build public infrastructure, having privatised everything during the neoliberal revolution of the 80s. You can see this here in Ireland. We're pretty good at building roads; there are always roads being built. But we haven't built big infrastructure projects like hospitals or railways, and so they often end up being expensive disasters with a great degree of rent seeking going on. Interestingly, Madrid built a metro system very successfully by effectively designing the construction around the election cycle so politicians could 'cash in' on various tranches of the metro being completed (say a section built every 5 years, lined up with election cycles). A pragmatic solution!

I'd argue the tide has shifted, at least in Britain (and many other European countries), toward the state having a more significant role in the ownership of public goods. The slow beginnings of this can be seen in the UK with renationalisation (the clunkily named Great British Railways) along with the constant backlash against private water, utility companies etc. 

Britain suffers the pioneers curse. First to do it, stuck with ancient infrastructure (Same as ourselves!) and thus restricted by it. It comes with advantages of course, they have an enormous expanse of underground tunnels since the 1860s, whereas some 50 years after proposal, all we have to show for our metro is part of the airport designed to accommodate and 500 million euro spent on nothing. 

Onto the Enterprise. The Belfast main line is one of, if not the busiest line in the country, with its southern terminus being the most busy station in the country. With major improvement works comes major delays, so on and so forth. Ultimately, I think they may have to just bite the bullet and go either quad track or with a separate HSR running in parallel. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but it certainly cannot continue as is. Widening the viaduct up towards Clontarf and onward would be a 19th century slightly suspect railway developers job!

The US is a different kettle of fish of course.