murphaph
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@Peter Fitz wrote:
think it was supposed to be four lanes, two traffic lanes, two bus, no ?
The video appears to show grooves for tramlines.
@PVC King wrote:
It is however encouraging that they are trying to take the asset forward in its current format and the centre is much better for the removal of that dreadful elevated cafe.
I loved that restaurant as a kid! So futuristic to eat look over the rail at the shoppers far below!
I actually prefer the old ILAC to this reclad one. At least the old one was honest.
@paul h wrote:
Any pictures murphaph would be greatly appreciated!
Nice pics jackwade
Give me a couple of days. 🙂
The Ongar Village development in D15 has a ‘proper’ street feel to it, with shops, pub etc. on ground level and accomodation overhead. Don’t know if this counts though.
Part of the reason for the empty office (and consequently retail) space has to do with the way the city has sprawled and lots of office space has been provided in the suburbs like Tallaght and Blanchardstown. My employer (for example) relocated fom Burlington Road to North West Dublin to consolidate their operations and save expensive rent in town. If transport was more effective it could potentially encourage business back into the city centre. Just a thought.
The same sort of thing can be seen in Glasgow actually but some companies (including one my mate works for) have decided to move back into town as their employees want it. Suburban industrial estates are soulless holes to work in much of the time with no decent pubs around to socialise etc. We might see that reversal here too. We definitely won’t if T21 isn’t delivered in its entirety and with proper integration.
The Phoenix Park Tunnel issue is political not practical. The union issues surronding it are ridiculous. Heuston drivers (much more militant than Connolly lads) don’t want to know. Freight trains are driven through by Connolly drivers who have to get taxis over to Islandbridge to pick up the trains for Dublin Port. Iarnrod Eireann (and govt) are shying away from conflict.
They should be using it for Kildare suburban services into Spencer Dock when it opens but they won’t. They don’t want the hassle. God help us when the interconnector negotiations come about. The unions badly need facing down in Irish Rail, really badly.
@PDLL wrote:
And do they genuinely destroy the scene? Are they truly that offensive that you would stop your car on a country road and go – damn, look at those white specks on the horizon
They’re only specks because they are far away in that picture :rolleyes:
Personally I believe the Luas runnng the full length of O’Connell St and on up to Broadstone will be what happens and will be great. I don’t find the wires obtrusive once suspended carefully from the buildings. Many prestigious streets in Europe have trams on them. Cars will be banned from O’Connell St in the long term, and Dublin Bus is supposedly going to completely overhaul it’s route network (to tie into enhanced rail services) which will see far fewer buses penetrate the city centre (and hence O’Connell St). Luas may just take one carriageway and the oher may be made two-way for the buses which remain. I have seen trams operate very well in pedestrianised areas and believe it would be be no different here. O’Connell St offers something no other north-south street on the northside can; it’s wide and can be made to have no crossing vehicular movements. This is a massive benefit for the trams which will get free reign from one end of the street to the other, delivering predictable journey times.
@a boyle wrote:
As for the kiosks i don’t know , but the whole thing will be finished soon enough!
Just in time for the RPA to dig it all up for Luas line BX and then Metro! 😀 Of course in the grand scheme of things it’s not a problem that we have the money to build mass transit systems, just seems an awful pity that all the work will be torn up so soon after completion.
I hope you’re right about the street being on the cusp of something great. It’s still an awful looking place with all those tatty cheap looking shops. They’re so bad that even the later architecture of BHS looks good in comparison to the older buildings which have been defiled with the tat.
I love the B&W tiling CIE used in all thise places. Real childhood memories of walking along platforms there. Here’s an old pic from Heuston (I wonder was the same Swedish firm responsible for the tan and orange also respoinsible for the B&W tiling??);
Ok, P11’s position on gauge was based on the notion of traditional heavy rail for the metro (NY, Munich, Berlin, London etc.) but now that the RPA have announced that the metro will actually be light rail like this, the gauge issue is no longer relevant and P11 hae no objection to te 1435mm european (Luas) gauge.
The reen Line was never supposed to be re-gauged but was laid with a wider loading gauge (swept path clearance) and with sleepers on ballast to allow 1435mm heavy rail metro trains to use it. This will not now happen. The metro will be light rail, low floor high capacity units (90m platforms=5/6 cars sets, more than adequate for Dublin for many years).
@Peter FitzPatrick wrote:
have P11 changed their position on the track gauge too ? surely IE’s network post interconnector will be far more extensive than any metro/luas combination in the next 20 years ?
I’m trying to get clarification on that. The metro is now no longer a heavy rail proposal so the old position is a little out of kilter in my view.
In my opinion there will be far more metro trackage potential in 20 years than IE trackage. In theory you could have metro levels of service from Citywest-Swords, Square-Swords, Cherrywood-Ranelagh, Stephen’s Green-Swords, Liffey Junction-Broadstone. There are longer term plans to bore a tunnel from Stephen’s Green to Tallaght and I can imagine in 20 years boring a tunnel from Broadstone to Ranelagh and extending the Luas line in a segregated manner to the M50 (takng the alignment originally proposed for the airport metro) to tie into metroWest, creating a hell of a network by adding one tunnel (Broadstone-Ranelagh) to the Platform for Change outline. You could also consider the Tallaght line in as far as Fatima to be almost metro grade segregation wise and this could someday see a tunnel bored from Fatima to Broadstone for example to create another cross city metro grade route. Remember the Red Line is only slow and painful from James’s to Connolly, the much longer bits in the suburbs are like a metro.
@Peter FitzPatrick wrote:
Also still curious about integration with the interconnector, the RPA fail to mention it in most correspondence. It seems quite strange that we’re looking at the prospect of boring two major city centre tunnels, both of which pass through the same city centre terminus, completely independently of each other ?
Well the metro units will be a lot smaller than the double decker DARTs IE propose to allow through the interconnector someday so the bore diameter will be very different and you’d never bore bigger than you have to (cost). The tunnels will cross at right angles anyway and th rolling stock will not be compatible so it’s not a big issue. There will be full integration between the two. The metro station will be constructed using the ‘box’ method whereby a large box is sunk from street level down. It’s very intrusive. The interconnector stations will all be mined from the inside out and should be far less intrusive during consrtuction. The interconnector wil naturally be under the metro. The RPA will have to allow for escalator/elevator shafts to the installed from the mezzanine level down to the interconnector or via the metro platforms (better). The real worry about metro/DART integration is at Cross Gunns Bridge. This is a vital connection which the RPA seem to be ignoring!
@Peter FitzPatrick wrote:
Murphaph, you seem to be better up than me on some of this so i won’t argue !
Although i thought that P11 were calling on the RPA to use the IE guage, certainly they do in their technical assessment, in which they also claim that the metro will not have sufficient capacity to meet demand with the platform length restricting the trains to 3 cars ? maybe this is referring to an older rpa spec, i’m not sure …
I’m an ordinary P11 member and on our board it’s been accepted by the guy who wrote that assessment that the currently proposed metro is ok on the capacity front at a pretty whopping 33k per hour (DART currently moves c. 100k daily, though will also massively increase post T21). The RPA are now proposing 90m platforms. This is adequate for 5/6 car operations which is just fine for Dublin.
This isn’t to say the RPA are doing everything right, they aren’t. Their omission of an interchange station at Glasnevin (future Maynooth DART) and the inclusion of the route by the Great Southern at the airport are most worrying. There are still issues to fight for on this one.
@Graham Hickey wrote:
The brickwork (is it called stretcher bond?) looks odd where the clock used to be. I wonder was it bricked up and that there used to be a hole to allow access to the clock on the plinth??
@Peter FitzPatrick wrote:
A few points ! ?
how are the metro & interconnector going to integrate?, with the interconnector due to be completed a few years after the metro ( i hope ) its difficult to see how the metro terminus will not be disrupted … the rpa cannot be allowed to ignore the far more beneficial interconnector & should have to construct any new lines to the standard IE gauge (which is 1600mm i think).
No I can’t agree. I follow this stuff quite closely and am a member of P11 also. I used to agree with using Irish Standard Gauge for metro to make it compatible with DART but looking at the propsed post T21 network and knowing that the RPA metro is in fact to be light rail, similar to the fantastic Metro do Porto and the metro units will be able to share trackage with Luas, it’s a better call to stay with European Gauge. Think of all the current and future Luas lines that are/will be at or near metro levels of segregation from traffic and imagine the metro units being able to access those stretches, providing many more 0 change journey possibilities. The much maligned Red Line actually has vast amounts of segregated running, virtually all the way from the Square to James’s is highly segregated and crosses few streets-it’s only the awful city centre stretch that suffers delays with the many junctions it encounters. The Green Line from Sandyford all the way to Charlemont is almost entirely segregated. The future Luas to Broadstone will run in the old MGWR alignment from Broombridge Station along by the railway down to Broadstone before emerging onto city streets (probably) to run down O’Connell street to connect with the extended Green Line. This Luas is likely to be extended in a completely segregated fashion to beyond the M50 via Finglas where it will cross the metroWest. The reason this is likely to happen is that the N2 dual carriageway provides an ideal environment to go elevated like the metroNorth along the swords Bypass. Don’t think of it as purely Luas and purely metro-there is a blurring of the lines on the horizon and it makes sense for a sprawling city like Dublin to have a two-pronged approach to it. It will be possible for example for metroWest trains to run from Ballymun to Citywest or the Square, rather than terminating at Belgard Road and forcing a change.
Look at sneltrams in Amsterdam or premetro’s in Cologne/Stuttgart for further examples, and these cities have higher population densites! A short train every 2 mins is far better than a long train every 10.
Would there be anything wrong with just replacing the Royal Standard? It’s not like we don’t have other buildings with them on and it causes no problems. It seems to look ‘right’ in that old 1916 pic.
The tunnel route is the route that the RPA told FCC to reserve. Check out the FCC website and look for the development plan maps. It’s clearly shown as the terminal route, not the GS Hotel one. I’d say it’s just been thrown in to make up the numbers.
PDLL, you’re away with the fairies if you think any of the dross currently being thrown up will become tourist attractions. It’s just so crazy I don’t know where to begin debating it.
Search for detached, min. 4 bed in co. cavan on this page and tell me they’ll be a tourist attraction! 😮 They are monstrosities in the main and completely out of sync with their surroundings. Here’s a samples;
Real rennaissace masterpieces, NOT!
All they do is blight the once beautiful landscape.
@Devin wrote:
More of the above please. I love this type of meandering pedstrianised precinct-a haven from vehicles and noise. The rest of the square is really shown up by this development, as is the appaling dross that was erected during the 90’s. This development feels quite continental to me.
@asdasd wrote:
if they used a mobile would it be ok? Rural people pay more for traditional phones as there is less people in their local zone compared to urban areas and they have to call urban areas for most offical calls: long distance to them, local to Dubliners.
Huh? Most calls are lo-call regardless of origin, certainly state services like the taxman and social welfare are lo-call (with a Dublin number provided if the office is in Dublin or whatever).
Moving on, people in the West can in some cases be terribly blind to anything that is built. Shannon Airport and the Shannon Free Zone, Shannon town itself is Ireland’s only ‘new town’ in the UK style. The Limerick Southern Ring, the N18 Newmarket on Fergus Bypass, the Ennis Bypass currently under construction. There’s heaps of money spent on the west, way more per person than in Dublin city, and the Dublin city infrastructure happens to serve the nation as well as us Dubs! If you take a train to Dublin, are you not availing of the investment in Heuston Station etc.? Some people need to wake up. There was a proposal to build an Eastern Bypass of Dublin. Even though I’m a dub, I’d rather they spent the money on buses or light rail in Cork. Sometimes investment in anything isn’t a good thing.
