Rail chiefs accused of Mullingar "rip-off"

Mullingar commuters are being hit for an extra €270 a year to have all but one of Dublin"s internal rail and tram routes covered by their annual commuter ticket, the Westmeath Examiner learned this week.In what has been described by one particular commuter as a form of 'culchie tax', it appears that rail users living outside the 'short hop' between Maynooth and Dublin are paying hundreds of euro extra to have the DART and all but one of the LUAS lines covered by their annual Taxsaver ticket, billed by Iarnród Éireann as 'the easy route to saving money on train and bus tickets'.Tom Brophy, a resident of Ashefield, Mullingar, travels to Dublin"s Connolly Station on a daily basis, before taking a green line LUAS to Sandyford, where he works as a software engineer.Speaking to the Westmeath Examiner this week, Mr. Brophy explained that commuters living along the Sligo line in Maynooth pay a total of €1,030 for their annual ticket to and from Dublin, while extra LUAS coverage costs them €400.'My contention is that just because I"m living in Mullingar, I have to pay a LUAS charge of €670 on top of a "point to point" ticket, which covers me annually between Mullingar and Connolly Station,' he said.As both Mullingar and Longford are both considered part of Irish Rail"s Dublin commuter line, Mr. Brophy cannot understand why this surcharge applies to commuters in Mullingar, and not to commuters in Maynooth.He described it as a 'pricing discrepancy', which ignores the fact that the use of LUAS services is a question of 'two commuters from two different counties buying a service which will be consumed entirely in a third county', making Maynooth commuters no different from those in Mullingar or Longford.'The notion that the commuter area stops at Maynooth is of course ridiculous,' Mr. Brophy said in a letter to Irish Rail recently. 'CIE runs commuters trains as far as Longford. So for my annual €3,000, I get a sub-standard commuter train, no DART service entitlement, and a surcharge for LUAS services.'I also get to share the service with those Maynooth commuters, with the result that the service is generally standing room only from 10-15 minutes prior to departure from Connolly as far as Maynooth.'This applies when the people in charge of platform management manage to have the train available for boarding for a reasonable (20-30mins) time prior to the scheduled departure. Increasingly, the train hasn"t been available for boarding until 5-10 minutes prior to scheduled departure, which leads to a build up of commuters waiting on the platform.'As the station management evidently are incapable of organising a queue for the service, there is a stampede when the train finally is ready for boarding. Notwithstanding the lack of services with my basic ticket, I would have expected that a person in Mullingar should be able to buy a LUAS ticket at the same price as a person from Maynooth.'At a recent meeting of Westmeath County Council"s Mullingar Area Committee, Irish Rail was roundly condemned by Council members for applying a €2 per day parking charge in the environs of Mullingar Railway Station, costing some commuters an extra €10 per week in travel expenses.A spokesperson for Irish Rail said that while he could sympathise with customers in this situation, the reality is that there isn"t a strong enough demand for all such tickets from customers living outside the 'inner commuter zone'.'Where we do have demand from further distance commuters is the LUAS red line, which takes commuters through Dublin City Centre from Connolly to Heuston Stations,' Irish Rail spokesperson Barry Kenny said this week.'This costs €240, but for commuters using the other LUAS lines, at the moment we don"t have a combined Taxsaver ticket to accommodate them, because there just isn"t a strong enough demand for it.'But if this changes, obviously it"s something we could sit down and examine with the Rail Procurement Agency (RPA), which operates the LUAS system.'