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ISSUE 1 2010

IRELANd

Ireland rediscovers railways as routes and depots reopen

A new rail freight service launched in August between Ballina and Dublin is set to increase from two to three trains a week. Irish freight forwarder International Warehousing and Transport (IWT) is chartering 18-wagon trains from Iarnrod Eireann (Irish Rail). Its initiative gives exporters and importers in north-west Ireland low-cost access to the many shipping lines serving Dublin port and has been hailed by the Irish Exporters Association (IEA) as providing a template for future multimodal transport development,

reducing

greenhouse gas emissions and making more efficient use of Ireland’s existing transport infrastructure. The hope is to increase the

service to five times weekly, at which point it will be taking 9,000 truck journeys a year off the N5 route and reduce congestion on Dublin’s M50 motorway. Howard Knott, IEA project director, says a lack of suitable equipment resulted in delays in ramping up the service. Iarnrod Eireann was equipped chiefly with wagons for traditional 40ft deepsea containers, but to connect with intra-European shortsea services it needed to handle 45ft units and is now leasing in wagons for this purpose. Dublin Port, meanwhile, is extending rail track to the quayside so wagons can get right under the crane and double handling is eliminated. One of the IEA’s main

objectives is to facilitate the smooth flow of goods and raw materials from manufacturer to final customer, Knott said at the IWT launch last year. Rail freight services such

as that already operated for DFDS between Waterford and Ballina and the new IWT service meet these objectives perfectly. Use of rail for moving containers is up to five times more environmentally friendly than road freight.€ Knott is encouraged by the reopening of a rail route between Limerick and Galway, but says other routes are also closing, such as that from Rosslare to Waterford. Care needs to be taken to ensure this infrastructure is kept available for future freight development.

He is hopeful that a freight

depot in Cork, currently mothballed, can be restored to service, allowing Dublin-Cork services to resume. Knott says one issue highlighted by the Irish Maritime Development Office in its new annual report is the number of empties€ Ireland either needs to import or to shift from Dublin, a primarily import market, to the export-driven Cork area. Knott says it is helpful that Ciaran Cuffe, a Green, was appointed junior transport minister (technically, minister of state for horticulture, sustainable travel and planning and heritage) in Ireland’s last cabinet shakeup, and hopes this can put rail freight back on the table. The IEA has been working

through its Rail Freight Group to reverse the decline in Irish rail freight and to offer greener options for exporters, particularly where heavy tonnage and high- volume goods are involved. The multimodal option is particularly valuable to companies operating in the west of the country that need to reach continental Europe through the east coast ports. The timber processing industry, centred on Ballina, moves a lot of logs and Knott says a unitised solution for these would make it a natural customer for rail. In a recent discussion document, the IEA noted that over the last 20 years, rail infrastructure both in Northern Ireland and the Republic has been substantially redeveloped to improve safety and increase capacity. Derelict

lines have

been redeveloped and big investment has been seen in rolling stock. The recession struck just as the major part of this passenger-focused development was completed. This has led to significant surplus resources being available in railway network infrastructure, locomotives, other rolling stock and trained personnel. These factors alone should focus network owners and rail service operators on securing additional business and sweat these assets, the document says. The IEA says governments

on both sides of the border must make modal shift a bedrock transport policy

and must open up rail freight services, effectively run by monopoly providers at present, to competition. Crucial to this, the IEA argues

that an independent regulator of network charges and access should be appointed and a rail freight incentivisation scheme introduced.

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