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by nephihaha 26 days ago
A couple of obvious observations: * Does not include Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man, both of which have notable rail networks (as they are not in GB). * Does not include heritage railways. There are a number of other railways on here which are not marked but offer tourist travel.
1 comments
rsynnott 26 days ago
NI gets slightly messy; do you include the Enterprise service to Dublin? If so, only the ones run by Translink, or also the ones run by Irish Rail? (The Dublin-Belfast service is a particularly weird train service in that it has _two_ operators, with joint ownership of the rolling stock).

You can also buy tickets from either operator, but you have to buy tickets from the operator in the country that you're leaving (even if they're return tickets). This leads to the interesting situation where a Dublin->Belfast->Dublin return journey a couple of weeks out costs 28EUR, but a Belfast->Dublin->Belfast return journey on the same day costs 30GBP (~35EUR).

And if you're over 65 and live in Northern Ireland, you can use it for free, but you have to be over 66 to use it for free if you live in the Republic of Ireland.

Currently it's just the one cross-border link, but the 2050 rail plan calls for two more, so they'll presumably at some point have to make all this less weird.

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nephihaha 25 days ago
NI gets very messy! They had so many lines once and between the Troubles and cuts, they lost many of them. (The cross-border canal system was even more neglected.) The NI trains run on a different gauge from here (this came up yesterday when someone was talking about the possibility of a train between Scotland and there.

The train to Dublin is way slower than it should be. The trains within the Republic tend to be much better. That said, Letterkenny's most logical rail connection would be to Derry just due to the lay of the land.

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rsynnott 25 days ago
> The train to Dublin is way slower than it should be.

There is, FWIW, a plan to improve that (https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/06/22/funding-to-cut...), though mostly on the Republic side of the border.

(The Rail 2050 plan plans to bring it dow further to 90 minutes, and up the frequency to once every 30 mins from once an hour, but that's fairly speculative at this point.)

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