Recently I decided to go to Mullingar in Ireland, which is conveniently on the train line between Dublin and Sligo. I decided to get some pictures inside the carriage for future prospective customers to check out.
Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) trains on this route have standard class seats only. First class is not offered as it is not a prestige route like others on the island, such as the Dublin to Belfast route.
Inside A Standard Class Carriage to Mullingar
I arrived at Dublin Connolly station, and the Sligo trains leave from platform one, opposite the Enterprise service to Northern Ireland. The ticket inspector advised to go all the way and to the right. Easy! It had been less than a week since my last journey by train in first class to Kerry, so I was curious how this would compare.
What About The View?!
Certain readers of this blog wanted me to get some photographs of the view. Unfortunately the views from this train are not nearly as nice as the ones heading south, but I managed nonetheless.
Overall Thoughts
Irish Rail trains are well kept, clean and modern. At the moment, they’re limited to 75% capacity due to the pandemic, but that is no real issue.
In normal times you are assigned seats and your name appears at the seat so you know it’s yours. That’s something I’d certainly like to see on Amtrak in the USA!
What do you think of the inside of Irish trains? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Was there a Cafe Car (like on Amtrak) or was food and drink available for purchase?
There usually is, but due to the pandemic they are not serving any catering at the moment on any service, which is a shame as the food is quite decent.
In non-COVID times those trains usually don’t have a snack car. They typically are limited to a catering trolley service with a range of snacks and beverages.
The Belfast and Cork routes use different rolling stock and have a catering car that sits between ‘First Plus’ (Belfast) (De Dietrich coaches) or ‘City Gold’ (Cork) (CAF Mark 4 coaches) and their respective standard class coaches. You can get table service in the premium coach, or take away to your seat in standard. They usually also have a trolly service in standard class.
In the past there was a full Dining Car and basic drinks bar service on the orange ‘BREL Mark 3’ intercity trains and the SuperTrain that existed before it, on longer routes like Cork and Kerry, serving full cooked meals for sit down or take out food for take to seat service. They had a (by then) dated, but good quality menu and made very nice chips (fries), burgers, steaks, omelettes, salads and (of course) a full Irish breakfast (or veggie equivalent) that came with all the usual eggs, bacon, sausage etc lashings of toast, soda bread, butter, jams, marmalade, orange juice and a pot of tea or a cafetière (French press). It had the vibe of a rolling diner. Nothing particularly fancy, but very good quality stuff and a great atmosphere.
The 1970s ‘SuperTrain’ https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/cie-supertrain/ advert showing off its catering services.
You can still get full breakfasts on some Cork services, but complex catering is, sadly, long gone, probably since the early 2000s. It used to be very much part of the experience of travelling by train. It’s a lot more boring and corporate nowadays.
I never had the pleasure of taking the train before 2005, as I wasn’t living here. Interesting to know that it had a much more comprehensive on board service. A shame it hasn’t continued, as I do like having a meal on the train while watching the world go by. The catering on Belfast and Cork is actually quite good and I always enjoy it. Thanks for all the interesting history there, I enjoyed the read! 🙂
Ive always said train travel is about the journey. Flights are about the destination. Sadly due to the additional time taken for train travek in my country, I end up flying for my vacations.
Although when I take my dog for my next vacation, we will be travelling by train.
I quite enjoy train travel, certainly far more so than any bus. The long distance trains in the USA are quite fun – as are long distance trains anywhere. One day I’ll hopefully take the Indian Pacific and The Ghan in Australia, but they are extremely expensive.
I think that train is an Iarnród Éireann 22000 Class made by Hyundai Rotem of South Korea, and undercarriages made by Tokyu Car Corporation of Japan. The picture of the countryside reminded me of Edna O’Brien.
I am glad you pointed that out, because I have almost no idea of these kinds of things. I was aware the trains were manufactured in Asia though, but not the specific details such that you have provided. Thanks very much for that!
As one of those “certain readers” I appreciate the pic. Beautiful countryside. Thanks for that!
Haha! It was absolutely you I was referring to! I’ll do better next time 🙂
Legroom looks surprisingly tight.
As an utter non sequitur, how much is Gaelic actually spoken in Ireland?
Irish people tend not to be overly huge people as a general rule. I noticed when I came here that I was no longer one of the shortest people, but more on the short side of average here – when compared to Australia anyway.
Unfortunately for the language, Irish is never spoken day to day in most of the country. There are Irish speaking regions called the Gaeltacht and they say about 95,000 people live there, out of a population of 4.9 million people. Even then, only 17,000 people of those would speak Irish as their dominant language. Everyone learns Irish here in school, but from what I hear it’s badly taught in that it’s done using uninteresting methods, so there is real concern the language will die out. All road signs, destination signs and so on are in both languages, as are all documents you would need to fill in. There is one Irish language TV channel (South Park dubbed in Irish is pretty funny) and some Irish radio stations but that’s about it. You can see in the map here that the Irish speaking areas are virtually all in the west of the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaeltacht
They’re just tight to squeeze more seats in, as those trains are for semi-commuter use.
I think they made a big error in the spec. They went for tighter seating than they needed to and it’s reflected in many Irish people not really seeing their standard class intercity product as much of an upgrade over a long distance bus, particularly as it offers little or no speed advantage on most routes vs just driving, they could have made comfort more of a selling point. Short sighted decision.
Their service from Dublin to Belfast takes 2h15 on average. You can drive it in 1h50. It’s only 166 km. The only route that marginally beats the motorway is Dublin to Cork. In both cases you might take the train to beat urban traffic city centre to city centre or to relax or work on board.
Also Ireland’s average height is actually a tiny bit taller than Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country
It’s certainly not a country you’d expect a lack of legroom, but Irish Rail seems to forget it’s not a budget airline and has lots of room, if it chose to use it better.
I completely agree on the speed of the services, they definitely could be a lot faster, that’s for sure! Interesting on the average heights, thanks for that.