The Irish Times yesterday ran a front page story on the problems at Irish Rail. In the weekend edition it ran an almost full-page story on the same subject but left the reader non-the-wiser. Yesterday’s story did give a fuller picture of the travels at the rail company but still no mention of the new building to house the National Traffic Control Centre (NTCC), which was to have been built at Connolly but is now completed at Heuston.
Saturday’s story had also been written by Martin Wall.
MARTIN WALL Public Policy Correspondent
Irish Rail’s centralised control system to oversee the movement of trains has just two spare central processing units, “heightening the risk of service disruption”, its company directors have been told.
A board meeting in March was told Irish Rail cannot find any more replacement parts for the existing system, which was commissioned more than 20 years ago and was supposed to have been replaced in 2024.
Executives at the State company will this week face questioning by the Oireachtas Committee on Transport about the substantial delays and cost overruns to the introduction of the planned new traffic management system (TMS).
Last month, the board wrote down by €50 million the value of its investment in the project after testing of software to implement the first phase of the new system identified problems.
The National Transport Authority (NTA) told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (Pac) in recent days that the Government was to provide €20 million over the next three years in additional funding to boost resilience in existing signalling on the key rail arteries around Dublin.
This is “to mitigate the risk of a major failure” of the existing central traffic control system at Connolly Station as a result of delays in introducing its planned replacement, the NTA said.
Minutes of the Irish Rail board meeting in March set out the concerns within the company. Directors heard the existing system had been originally commissioned in 2004 and that between 2018 and 2020 high-risk hardware items were replaced and software upgrades were applied.
“It was noted that this was a temporary life extension measure, as TMS was planned for completion in 2024,” the minutes said.
“It was advised that the current centralised traffic control (CTC) system had been reduced to two remaining central processing spare units, heightening the risk of service disruption” from any future CTC failures, and that “Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) is unable to source any further replacement parts” for the current CTC system. “It was noted that there would also be an inability to support infrastructure changes to increase service frequencies or to successfully bring into service big capital investment programmes.”
However, the NTA briefing document to the Pac said timelines for key projects such as Dart to Wicklow, Dart+ and Navan railway line, due to be commissioned in 2029, 2031 and 2035 respectively, were not expected to be impacted by the current delays in the TMS delivery.
The Irish Rail minutes say the board was told structured, CTC options analysis confirmed the immediate priority was to implement targeted upgrades “to mitigate high and urgent operational risks, manage obsolescence and signallers’ workload pressures”.
The Pac chairman, Sinn Féin TD John Brady, said the delays and cost overruns with the planned TMS were “rapidly becoming one of the most serious public-sector IT failures in the history of the State”.
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