Idea of super-high-speed railway line for the west of Ulster is 'ridiculous' overkill says transport professor

Prof Brian Caulfield from Trinity College Dublin’s Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Department told the News Letter the plan would be like building a full-on motorway where a rural road would do.

He was reacting to news that new Northern Ireland transport minister John O’Dowd has stated his intent to build a new super-fast railway line from Portadown to Londonderry via Omagh and Strabane; currently, no rail line exists there.

It is all part of a cross-border plan to expand the island of Ireland’s rail network.

See maps of the plans here.

This has been talked about for years.

But now that the Stormont government has been revived with Mr O’Dowd in charge of road-and-rail policy, the Sinn Fein MLA has indicated a willingness to pursue the new line (ultimately linking to another new rail line to Armagh, as well as the existing Portadown to Dublin line).

"Finalising the rail review that puts us on the path to delivering these interventions is one of my key priorities as the infrastructure minister,” Mr O’Dowd told the Assembly recently.

He also affirmed that 124mph is the planned speed for the Portadown-Londonderry service: a speed roughly equivalent to the early bullet trains which Japan built in the 1960s.

However, whether any of this will ever happen in reality is open to question.

"For rail to work, you need population density,” professor Caulfield told the News Letter.

"Japan is one of the most densely-populated islands on the planet, and it works there – and I’ve been on it.

"But in Japan that’s linking up megacities: Tokyo to Kyoto, Hiroshima, Osaka. Those are cities of millions.”

Prof Caulfield applauds the idea of creating some kind of rail line from Portadown to Londonderry, as well as new links to Donegal.

That’s because meeting targets for suppressing climate change will require better public transport and less private road traffic.

However super-fast rail in particular is “massively expensive” to build – therefore “at that speed, it is ridiculous to assume that could happen” in the west of Ulster.

He added: “The equivalent would be like upgrading a rural road with a motorway.

"The reason the rural road exists is because it doesn’t have the demand to warrant being a motorway.

"From a climate perspective and an ambition perspective, I’d love to see it.

"But embedding it in a bit of realism, I don’t think it’s something that’s likely.”

Northern Ireland may not be physically big enough to make a 124mph train service work properly, too, even if the demand existed.

"Say a train was coming from Belfast to Derry – and that was all it was doing – it could get up to that speed,” he said.

"But if a train was stopping at Antrim, Ballymena, Coleraine, it’d never get up to that speed.”

A speed of 124mph (believed to be the maximum intended speed, not the average operational speed) would be far faster than any trains now operating in Northern Ireland.

For example the Belfast-Dublin Enterprise only goes at a top speed of 90mph, and most of the time its operating speed is closer to 50mph.

Separate to these blueprints for new lines, there are currently major upgrades going on to the Belfast rail network.

The old Great Victoria Street station is being moved several hundred yards west, is being expanded, and will be renamed Grand Central Station.

Meanwhile Yorkgate, another one of the city’s main stations, is also undergoing an expensive revamp.