Great Western Railway

Donogh Diamond blogs ahead of tonight's Prime Time:

Trains are dangerous things. I don’t mean in the sense that any fast-moving large steel machine is something of a hazard, but rather that their relative beauty, sliding quietly through the countryside, and the memories they evoke, people seem happy to apply an entirely different set of rules to them.
We love the idea of trains. But that is the problem. It’s the idea we love, the reality is something we are less well-acquainted with. With the exception of the suburban workhorse of the breed, packed to the doors with commuters (which we hardly consider a real ‘train’ at all) most people’s experience of trains tends to be a bit limited.
We remember our first trip on one as a child, rattling along the track down the east coast, perhaps. Interesting visitors were “met off the train”. Later we remember heading off on an intercity train on what seems, in our memory, to be the most romantic of weekends, with our first serious college girlfriend. Then the memories become less clear. The occasional trip to Cork for work (when the destination was within a taxi ride of the station) similarly rare trips to Belfast, and a memorable weekend jaunt or two to Galway.
Trains also have the advantage that you don’t have to pay for them. Of course you have to buy a ticket, but it seems unlikely that, on any intercity service, that actually covers the real cost of your journey (even leaving aside the fact that when the romantic memories above were created, you were probably the holder of some sort of concession ticket). So it’s not really that you don’t have to pay for them, it’s that a very large proportion of the cost is invisible.
And the trains we love the most, the railway memories we cherish the most, are the ones when “we almost had the carriage to ourselves”. This is the ultimate in public transport luxury. Strolling about the carriage, snoozing across two seats, and resting our feet (against all by-laws and regulations) on the seat in front of us.
So we want more of these intercity trains. We campaign for them. We demand them. But we don’t seem to actually use them that much . . .
It appears that what we are really demanding is more of the most expensive type of public transport system there is, which we will then decline to use, but will pay for in spades in our taxes, and the under-utilisation of which will delight us, on the rare occasions we deign to board an intercity service.
The most extraordinary example of this is the recently-reopened Western Rail Corridor, which, in building a line from Ennis to Athenry, has linked the cities of Limerick and Galway by rail for the first time in decades.
The people of the two cities have however, almost to a man and woman, declined to use it to travel from one to the other. Some will still tootle out the effectively-suburban lines which have always operated from Galway to Athenry and from Limerick to Ennis, but there, for almost everybody, the journey ends. On the new section built to link the two cities, the trains travel virtually empty.
Campaigners still insist that not only is this a vital link between Limerick and Galway, but that it must be extended to Claremorris, and then perhaps even to Sligo. Given the fact that so few people are using the section that has just re-opened this might seem strange. But we’re talking about trains, and the normal rules don’t apply.
Ghost Train – The Western Rail Corridor. ‘Prime Time’, Tonight, 9.30pm
Donogh Diamond