Northern Ireland Railways > Reviews > Railtrouble on the railways

Author's product rating:   

Frequency of trains	Satisfactory
Reliability of trains	Occasionally on time
Comfort of trains	Comfortable
On-board facilities	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Friendly staff
Disadvantages:	Where shall I start?

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

The governement continuously encourages people to ditch their environment polluting cars for rail services in order to help combat pollution and reduce road accidents. There isn't anyone in the Unitied Kingdom who would oppose these principle, so why are our cars not burning away on a scrap heap with everyone jumping on the trains?

The answer is simple - rail services cannot really be called a service. This can be reflected in Northern Ireland by NIR. I get the train every day to university because I cannot afford a car but the service offered by NIR does encourage you to start thinking about saving those pennies.

My local stop is only about ten minutes away from my house and it is a hole. Fair enough, it is not the main stop in my town (it lies on the outskirts) but I do expect some kind of decent stop. It is a brick shelter which gives very little protection when it is windy and raining. It is filthy, smelly with lots of graffitti. The graffitti is constantly painted over only to be graffitted on again...the result being one big mess.

As we are all standding huddled as close together as possible for protection from the wind and rain, the announcer system booms out that there will be a delay of about six minutes. Everyone sighs, but whats new. It frequently happens.

The train comes and, gee, surprise, surprise, it is backed to bursting point. We squeeze on and if we are lucky enough we can get the odd seat. Conditions inside the train are not that nice either. It is dirty, with broken windows and seats. But we are at least on a train and we are going to our destinations.

I used to think that was it. But recently, the trains have begun breaking down as they are on their way, sometimes sitting for 20 minutes to half an hour. Again comes the apologetic announcement and NIR's favourite word - "Sorry". People often take it out on the staff, who I feel sorry for. At the end of the day it is not their fault - the staff at NIR are always friendly and helpful. That is the only good thing about the service.

This might sound really awful. But when I am annoyed I just think about all those terrible rail crashes in England where people have died. I am thnakful that our service has not got to that stage. They were, a couple of months ago, talking about having to shut down the network here due to lack of funding that was needed to bring the service up to a save standard. The local governement stepped in and provided a grant and we are soon to get many new rail carriage sets.

But this is not enough. Why should we be made to pay for this supposed service, especially when there are regular price hikes. Where is our money going - not into improvements; more like into the pockets of company shareholders. The governement has some serious thinking to do about the state of our railways and must provide massive funding to bring them up to a level such as exists in France. Now that is a rail service!