Transit Blogging: Belfast to Cork via Dublin and the LUAS

First off, a few practical tips from our Ireland rail experience.  Overall the system was rather straightforward to use.  Prices seem to be considerably cheaper online, and you can still order tickets the night before and pick them up at the station with no difficulty.  You’d have to be traveling a lot more than we did to make proper use of any of the rail passes and I’m guessing if you are traveling that much it’s probably worth also springing for the bus pass.  That covered, a few details:

1. Reserved seats will be specified on your ticket and will sometimes be specified at the seats themselves.  You’ll have a car letter and a seat number, the car letter is specified in the electronic readout on the side of the car, but not elsewhere.
2. People seem to regularly crowd in the close cars, leaving a fair amount of room if you walk to the more distant ones.  I’m not sure how to combine this with optimal car picking for reservations.
3. Snack carts go through with reasonable selection.  The selection is a bit better at the actual snack cars although when we wanted a full meal not all the sandwiches on the menu were available.  The sandwiches themselves weren’t half bad, but they’re also not that exciting.  This all really makes sense, as none of the train rides will be that long.
4. The fare gates seem to work just fine for the commuter rail but often were had trouble processing proper rail tickets.  Fortunately they seem well aware of this problem and take steps to resolve it.
5. The LAUS, a streetcar light rail system, provides a nice chic way to get between the two main stations in Dublin.  In this, Dublin has a leg up on Chicago where the integration of the elevated rail and the railroads is not impressive.
6. Trains were often a bit late but weren’t catastrophically so.  I did like the reliability signs that were up in the station and included on the slideshow.

Since our first train trip was discussed in an earlier entry, let me dwell a bit on LUAS.  It’s the intra-city light rail system in Dublin.  There’s two lines and they don’t directly connect although you should be able to get between them via the other transit options with no trouble.  The system seems pretty recent, actually, the sleek sexy cars seem like they’re from the near future or a world’s fair rather than the present.  The fare machines are also nice, although the touch pads take some force to use.  One cool feature, the bills and cards it would take depended on what you were buying, so it could do credit cards and larger bills and such but only for big purchases.  That seems like a fair way to avoid having change problems or paying a lot in credit card fees.  I’ll probably go through and tag all of my transit pictures at some point for early review, but I did take a fair number on each line to try to give a feel for the integration into the city and also what the ride was like.  One last note for now, I learned from my wife’s local friend that LUAS apparently is the Irish word for tram and not an acronym as I assumed.  Some clever engineer may have also back-fitted an acronym for something, but if so I haven’t figured out what it could stand for.