We needed the ramps, but after spending all that money where are the rain shelters?
Irish Rail have again announced they will be hiking their fares for 2014. This comes on top of the fortune they spent on a station “upgrade” in Sallins that has left the place almost worse than it was to start with.
This week we have another hike in fares from Irish rail and the National Transport Authority. Annual tickets will go up from the 1st November and all other fares increase on 1st December, just before any Christmas shopping. Hard pressed commuters are faced with the 4th consecutive year of fare increases.
The daily fare from Sallins to Dublin is already way too steep compared to other comparable stations – it costs almost 4 times as much to go from Sallins to Dublin than it does to go from nearby Hazelhatch or even Maynooth.
The logic behind these fare increases is hard to understand – if Irish Rail are serious about increasing passenger numbers, surely they should be cutting the fares, rather than hiking them?
It’s also incredibly frustrating to see that after all the money that was spent on the station upgrade in Sallins, they still haven’t got around to installing the second rain shelter that was long promised. They started work with two shelters that could accommodate almost 80 passengers and they finished with a single one that can fit at most 15. All that money later and people still have nowhere to stand when it rains. It beggars belief that for all their engineers they didn’t seem to anticipate rain might fall in an Irish winter.
Given that this blog post concerns facilities at Sallins Railway Station, may I, as someone who passed through the station a few weeks ago, raise another issue:
Where are the ticket vending machines?
First, some context. Sallins is of course strategically placed on the Grand Canal. One fine day, I walked the Grand Canal Way from Grange Castle (on the outskirts of Clondalkin) to Sallins, with a pleasant stop at Lyons Village for a pot of tea and a slice of cake on the the way. Then I arrived in Sallins in the late afternoon, I went to the station to check out the train times. It was a Sunday, and it turned out that I had about three hours to wait till the next train to Dublin. I also thought that, while I was at the station, I should check out the location of ticket machines, so that I wouldn’t have difficulty finding a ticket machine for my ticket to Dublin. After all there was no lack of notices threatening dire consequences for anybody who boarded a train without a valid ticket. I was jolly glad that I checked! I scoured the platforms in vain for ticket machines. Then, after widening the search, I finally located a ticket vending machine in the norrthern car park of the station.
So I returned to the canal-side, had a meal at an adjacent pub, and walked down the canal towpath to Naas Harbour and back. It was dark by the time that I arrived back at the Station, and I arrived from the south. I couldn’t locate any ticket vending machine at all in the south car park, still could not locate any machine on either the south or the north platform, but luckily knew where to find the ticket machine in the north car park.
Because, so far as I could tell, not only were there no ticket vending machines on the station platforms, there were not even any signs directing one to a nearby machine.
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One can walk along the Grand Canal Way in both directions from Sallins. (The following weekend, I returned to walk from Sallins to Robertstown, and continued past the Hill of Allen into Kildare.) Also it seems to me that one could make a nice circuit from Sallins, along the canal, over the Leinster Aqueduct, and then continue on side roads to Bodenstown, and then back to Sallins. (I walked the route as far as Bodenstown a few years ago, when Sallins hosted a Culture Night event.) So people who are not locals might well use the station from time to time, and perhaps this could be encouraged with more signposted walks and walk leaflets. As someone who does not drive a car, it is good to get out by public transport to places in the neighbourhood of Dublin for walking, casual exploration and changes of scene. Though it seems that frequency of service is an issue in the Kildare direction.