New Travel Plans

I'm originally from Dublin, but moved to Portarlington 13 years ago when I got married.

Even so I continued to work in Dublin and got the train up and down on a daily basis. Back then it was somewhat unusual to commute 50 miles to work, and yet as the years went by and the property boom drove prices out of the reach of sanity and reason more people wound up spreading further afield and making the daily trek. Some lasted, many gave it up after a few years, either moving back or making other plans.

And so it was, in the first years I would read something, listen to the radio or whatever. Later I got a laptop and would get some work done, read news, play games or whatever. One thing the practice of this commuting meant was that I had learnt to keep time as I had to live according to the timetable of Iarnrod Eireann.

In addition to that I would cycle, bus or later on get the Luas into town to where I was working at any given time.

Of course this meant that 3-4 hours of my working day were spent getting from home to work and back and over the years the train journey home rose from 40 minutes to over the hour.

Then the company I work for was bought by another, overall it was a good thing, it meant that there are better chances for growth and I'm working with a good crowd, but it also meant my job moved out of the city centre and beyond the reach of the train. One day I decided to try doing the commute by public transport, leaving the house at 5:40am, getting the first train, the Luas and the bus and arrived a bit after 8am. Given that was under ideal circumstances, I pretty much concluded there and then that that wasn't going to work.

Plan B was and is to drive it. I've found that driving up comes to around the hour and driving back is somewhere between 1h15m and 1h30m. That's a fair bit shorter than the previous commute and carries a lot less of the scheduling hassle that went with depending on CIE for your daily travel plans. On the other hand I hadn't realised how much I depended on those two hours on the train, one to wake up and the other to wind down.

Still and all, life is change and after thirteen years, there is a certain relief in not being at the mercy of CIE or constrained by their timetable.

Take a Look at the Lawwwwman...

I happened to see Colm Meany on The Panel a few weeks back and some of the discussion was how he was going to be in the forthcoming US version of "Life on Mars" and once I'd gotten over the momentary confusion of imagining him as Sam Tyler I was quite intrigued with the idea, a lot of this comes from the fact that my mental image of him is less of the character from the Star Treks and more as the Da from the likes of The Snapper (looking up that reference I see IMDB has the keyword "Small Town" associated with it, which is a bit of a surprise but then I guess Dublin comes across as small to people from a country you couldn't drive across in the one day).

Anyhow it occurred to me to go looking for a teaser for it to see what it looked like and so I toddled off to Youtube and searched for it. What I got instead was unexpected but not entirely unwelcome....

My Victor Meldrew Moment

This was nearly "My First Victor Meldrew Moment" but in fairness me railing against the something which irritates me is nothing new, nor indeed is me giving form to them by sending them to some mailing list or Usenet group but while I've been knocking around for a while I hadn't done the whole Blog thing.

It's probably an indicator that I set up the blog some time last year and hadn't actually gotten around to posting something to it until now, and while I sort of planned to be my personal soapbox for general rambling rantage and other observations and just couldn't have been bothered.

And so it stood where I was contemplating my displeasure on a specific issue and just for a moment considered writing in to the Irish Times. I realised almost immediately that this can not be a good thing and so instead decided to finally get some use out of my little soapbox.

Which brings me to the original stimulus for this.

What is it with Iarnrod Eireann and the Mushroom Treatment?

You see, I get the train to work in the morning which leaves at too-early o'clock in the morning. The one advantage of it is that it's one that has just the one stop before it gets to me and we are more or less guaranteed a seat.

And so it was on Monday of last week that I landed up somewhat bleary-eyed to the station only to discover that they had a little notice up saying that it had been canceled ("due to a dispute" according to the guy there) and that the train from Galway was delayed by 30 minutes. A while later it emerged that they would be stopping the train from Limerick would be stopping at "7:00", which turned out to be a bit more like 7:15. Once we finally landed into the Heuston the announcement was apologising if ("if"!) we were inconvenienced and that it was due to "Operational Problems".

Now that's annoying, but hardly worth bothering my non-existent audience with. The next day I land over to find that once again it had been canceled. Hmm, okay a pain but at least I had a plan for this occasion, i.e. breakfast roll, but on reflection it didn't really offset standing in the freezing cold for 30-odd minutes.

At least by this stage I'd begun to get the hang of this game and at least thought to keep an eye on their website, and so was rewarded. At 23:30 they decided to let us know that the train wouldn't be there for the third morning running, and again due to "operational problems". And so it has been since. Moderately reliable rumor has it that it's due to a dispute in their Inchicore works, but somehow this detail hasn't been shared with us and nor is there any forecast as to when we get our usual schedule back.

This is a tad strange as they aren't usually shy about blaming such things on unofficial industrial action.

And so it was that I decided to actually ring up their customer service number and ask today (this being the 7th day of the operational difficulty from my point of view).

On the first try I got an IVR where the first option was to inquire about timetables (um, I don't really want to listen to a recorded message) and the fourth was complaints. I took a moment to consider the available options when something like a ten second timeout kicked in and instead of repeating the menu it just said "Goodbye" and hung up. Cheers lads.

Hmm, what to do. Do I really want to talking to someone who's job it is to listen to people moan? Maybe first I'll try the times option first. Redialed. Started to get something like a recorded message and then a real person (fair enough). Asked them about it and there was a general response of them not having a clue beyond what was on the website.

Cheers lads, and so here it is we still are in the same situation where there is bog all actual information beyond "The train is gone and we can't tell you when it will be back."