Irish Fail
If you have ever had the misfortune to travel with Irish Rail then I sympathise with you. I can guess that it was probably one of the most harrowing events in your life. If not, then you’re a stronger person than most. Like many services in Ireland, you are charged through the nose for a pathetically inefficient and third-class experience. I wonder if the monkeys in charge of Irish Rail even care at this stage that their service is a laughing stock. I also pity visitors from countries such as Germany and France, for these people it must be like leaving behind regular steak dinners at home to come over here and eat slices of ham out of a bowl filled with pubic hair.
It would be optimistic of me to suppose that there is at least one bright spark in the whole organisation. This person, if he or she exists, would earn our eternal thanks if they could put their mind to work on the problem of pre-booked seats. I doubt that this talented individual is the same man who polices the toilets in Heuston Station. He lets all women through the barriers for free. If you are unlucky enough to be a man, then I guess you have to cough up. He doesn’t want to perv at your arse, so you have to pay. It’s good to see sex offenders being reintegrated into society though.
Finding a seat on the train is a lottery. Many people choose to reserve their seats online, although I can’t for the life of me understand why they bother. The reserved seats are exactly the same as all the others and frequently I have seen people arrive on the train to find their seat occupied and no indication, either in the electronic display, or by means of a card, that their seat is reserved. There is certainly no sign of an inspector or any other personnel to assist, in fact, any problem at all is pretty much your problem, such is the faceless nature of the company. To add insult to injury, the poor person has to suffer the snide stares and glares of the smug boneheads who take pleasure in the drama of watching someone wandering aimlessly up and down the aisles looking for a seat and wondering to his or herself why they were silly enough to expect that an Irish transport company could for once provide a pleasant service.
Travelling on the Cork to Dublin train the other day was unbelievably horrible (no change there then) and left me struggling to find the will to live. There weren’t any non-reserved seats vacant anywhere, so there was nothing for it but to stand until the next station. At that point, my companion and I spotted two seats with no reservation in the electronic display. We sat down happily, placing our bags overhead. Almost immediately after we stretched our legs, a yellow name popped up
on the display. This was too fucking frustrating for words. The idiotic shambles of a system in place means that often a seat is marked as unreserved, only for a name to pop up half an hour later once there is no other seat to move to. Is it too much to ask that one be able to sit down in an unreserved seat and settle, without the need to strain your neck upwards like a retarded heron for the whole journey, periodically checking to see if you will have to get up and stand, just because some blasted bunch of rip-off merchants can’t be bothered to give a fig about the customer? How about putting all the reserved seats together, after all, they are not first-class seats so why the hell does it matter which part of the train you are sitting in? I pay a scandalous amount for a ticket (you will of course notice, the prices have remained at the hyper-inflated pre-recession level) and all I ask is that I can go to a carriage where there are seats available that I know I am allowed to sit in. It’s as simple as that. If the display is empty, then people should sit down and refuse to budge after that, even if Queen Elizabeth’s name subsequently comes up. Maybe that way, some member of staff will have to suffer the frustration and embarrassment of confrontation with an irate customer, and maybe then the bumbling company will make some effort to listen to the people who pay for their shoddy service.
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i agree with everything on this such a piece of crap organisation it isnt funny, do you know that if you want euoropean tickets irish rails policy is not to offer the service to search on their website but to search raileurop.co.uk ring sum knobhead in dublin with the times of your journey, and then they charge you an extra 50-60 quid as to whats on the SNCF/TGV tickets, whilst our british and french/german neighbours can access their own national carriers and book their tickets at normal rate tro an online portal…..also you can get a train ticket from London to Rosslare or Dublin which bundles the price of the ferry aswell, but you can’t do it if your irish and want to get the train from waterforsd to london, like we do live in the common market the same as the british so why can’t we avail of this offer..its funny really that my father went to work in london in the 60s and was able to get a ticket in Lismore which lasted him all the way to london. i think this means the service is gone backwards, especially considering that you can’t get a train direct between waterford and cork
Never a truer word spoken from the pride of Waterford
[...] they’re advertising Irish Rail, how about being honest? They should have blondie above dressed as a humungous foam turd, shrugging her sholders while [...]
Public transport in Ireland sucks sweaty Jackie Healy-Rae balls! We have spent tens of millions already on “researching” and implementing a universal ticketing system for all forms public transport in Ireland. They still havent managed to come up with a plan.
For just ten quid I could have told them to use the same ticket format for train, bus, luas, donkey drawn rickshaw… systems, with a relative value for each journey type. Problem solved in a matter of a few days. But no, we can’t do this because we have a beautiful setup in Ireland where these “government-owned” semi-state bodies are all competing with each other and therefore, all have their little petty clauses they need to get into the pie.
Public transport…
And have you ever noticed the amount of bus related incidents we have on Irish roads? I think they average out and 1 per week or something.
Yeah buses are about as reliable as Indian rickshaws! I really do think that our abysmal transport will end up ruining any chances of economic recovery. Bring in the Germans I say. They have railway systems to die for.
“for these people it must be like leaving behind regular steak dinners at home to come over here and eat slices of ham out of a bowl filled with pubic hair” – very funny and very true.
Irish Rail is an abortion. The pre-booked seats setup is a laughable fiasco. If you collect your ticket from the machines at Heuston, the new ticket-reading machines at the turnstiles actually can’t read them. Can’t read THEIR OWN FUCKING TICKETS! It’s like something out of Father Ted.
Don’t worry Carol, I hear a report is being commissioned into why the machines aren’t reading the cards. A special committee consisting of Mary Robinson, Michael McDowell and Fortycoats is also to be established.
You should expect the report to be published in Autumn 2012.