Not one person stood on the platform in a bleak and dilapidated Carrick-on-Suir railway station during "rush hour" last Friday evening.
It was just as well nobody required the 16.50 train service to Limerick city – stopping at Clonmel, Tipperary town and Limerick Junction on the way – as no train arrived.
"There is no train – it's cancelled," announced a signal man on duty at the deserted station before explaining that the cancellation of the few trains that stop in Carrick between Waterford and Limerick was a regular occurrence in the last five weeks.
“We never know until the day when a train is cancelled, the drivers are sick or on holidays and they can’t replace them,” he said.
Timetable
Every day, with the exception of Sunday and Bank Holidays when no services are provided, two trains are scheduled to leave Waterford for Limerick and return, with a train due to stop in Carrick on four occasions every day, according to the timetable.
In recent weeks, on the days that a train is cancelled a hired bus pulls into Carrick station in its place with the driver of the bus accompanied by the Irish Rail staff member that would have travelled on the train to hand out tickets. Last Friday just three people got off the bus and nobody got on before it continued on to Limerick at a quarter to five.
“They don’t inform the public that there will be no train – they just put on the bus on the day instead,” said the signal man.
The annual National Rail Census carried out by the National Transport Authority and Iarnród Éireann in 2015, details of which are contained in a draft review of rail services for Minister for Transport Shane Ross, showed Carrick-on-Suir station to be the quietest on the national rail network on census day, with just one passenger boarding a train at the station on that date.
It appears the train service for a town of more than 6,000 located on the border of Tipperary, Waterford and Kilkenny is not being availed of because the timetable is very limited and unreliable.
For years, pleas to Irish Rail to put on more services and promote the line have "fallen on deaf ears", said Seamus Campbell of the Carrick-on-Suir Business Association.
“Every town needs a train station. The timetable is just not conducive to allowing people travel by train to Waterford or Clonmel for work. It is just not possible. Because the service is so restricted people car pool to get to work. The train station is of no real use to people as it is,” he said.
In recent years Irish Rail has stripped out one of the two lines that ran through the station and about 10 years ago cut the services in half.
Busier timetable
“We had four trains going to Limerick and four coming back 10 years ago, now there are only two. Because of the busier timetable 10 years ago, people in Carrick could go for a day out to Dublin, Cork,
Killarney
or Galway. That is just not possible any more because the few trains that are going through Carrick now miss the links at the junction and in Waterford to the bigger cities,” said the signal man on duty at the station.
The Carrick station was very busy back then because of the "boat train" to Rosslare and the beet trains between Mallow and Wellington Bridge, none of which now exist.