Dublin Cabbie Dreams of the Dear Old Days Gone By

Sunday evening in snowy Dublin, and An Spailpín Fánach is on his way home from the rugby. I hail a cab on Shelbourne Road and direct the chariot to the Northside. Off we go.

We go past the turn off Pearse Street for the new bridge but An Spailpín passes no remarks. Opinions vary about being quicker along the quays or up the NCR. Nothing’s going to be quick today as the snow falls relentlessly. An Spailpín isn’t too bothered.

And then the cabbie gets talking. Was I at the rugby? How much were the tickets? Jaysus, that’s a lot to pay for a ticket. Well, I mean to say!

And he had a point. An Spailpín got them half-price, thanks to a deal run by the pragmatic Leinster Branch during the week, but the cover price of ninety Euros was shocking. No questions there.

The driver has moved on to the weather as we crawl up Pearse Street. I remark that the Nitelinks were cancelled on Saturday, leaving the citizens – whom Dublin Bus is meant to serve, after all – high and not-so-dry in the snow on Saturday night.

“Ah yeah,” says my man. “It was just like the good old days. I was doing Connolly Station, around there, and you could see the people going up the North Strand looking for a cab to get home.”

It's like listening to The Wolf wondering why Little Red Riding Hood didn’t come around here no more. I remember those good old days too, queuing for hours with drunks and ne’er-do-wells at College Green. We had made it to Tara Street by now, and were at a dead stop.

“This looks bad,” said the charioteer. “Will we go up Gardiner Street? What do you think?”

“Hold on,” replied your correspondent, hackles raised nicely. “If we were going up Gardiner Street, why didn’t we go across the new bridge? What’s the point in looping around?”

“Well, there’s a slope on Gardiner Street. I was worried about getting stuck, and I didn’t think the quays would be this bad.”

And I’ve got a mug here who’ll shell out ninety bills for a rugby ticket and fancies a tour of the docks, suspects the cynical Spailpín Fánach.

“A slope? On Gardiner Street? Look, you’re right. We’d better not chance it. Let me out here.”

The taxi-driver is shocked by this. “Are you sure? I don’t mind.”

“I know well you don’t mind,” said An Spailpín Fánach, the truest word uttered by either of us during the trip, “but I don’t want to take a chance with that oul’ slope. I’m better off taking a bus.”

I got out at Beresford Place, paid him his legal due, and left a €0.00 tip. And then I trudged on through the sludge and snow, west and north in the city on the way home. Yet strangely content all the same, thinking of the dear old days of the Dublin taxi driver and how, whatever else happens, those days are gone forever and will have no tears shed after them.

Reading the Runes of the Dublin Bus Routes

An Spailpín Fánach is mystified why Dublin Bus isn’t a more popular topic of conversation in the city. Dublin Bus, as the majority public transport system in the city, has a huge impact on the lives of the populace. But there never seems to be any discussion of how the buses operate; why they do what they do, and why they don’t do something else. Perhaps the fact that one so seldom sees the likes of Ryan Tubridy or Gee Ryan squeezed in the standing room part of the bus between the chemically dependent and the hygienically disinclined has something to do with it.

The news reports of the job losses in Dublin Bus have been cursory at best, and overtaken by the hideous scenes at the Anglo-Irish Bank EGM. Is this an instance of news management on Dublin Bus’s part? How interesting to note, for instance, that the latest news section of the News Centre link on the Dublin Bus website does not have any news of the layoffs at all, or their consequent effect on the overall service in the city?

Curiouser and curiouser. How interesting also to note the repeated commitments that, in spite of the great breach in the hull of the company’s finances, no routes will be lost. To which An Spailpín asks: why not?

Who decides what makes a bus route? How do you get that job? Who comes first? The company, the drivers’ union, or the commuter? Perhaps a look at some of those routes – that are immaculate, inviolate, safe from the sickle – will be instructive.

Let’s start at the start. Route 1. Route 1 of Dublin runs twice daily. At half past seven in the morning and eight minutes past five in the evening, a bus leaves Parnell Square East and travels to Poolbeg Extension (whatever that is). A bus makes the return journey, twice daily, at five to eight and twenty to six. There is one bus at the weekend, early in the morning on Saturday, and that’s it. And what An Spailpín wants to know is: why?

Route 5, from O’Connell Street to Sandyford Industrial Estate. Five times daily, there and back. Buses at eight, eleven, twelve, one and three. Why? Who needs to go from O’Connell Street to the Sandyford Industrial Estate at those hours?

Route 58c is a bit of a legend. It’s one for the connoisseur, the same way that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the biggest flop of all the Bond movies, but always gets high marks among aficionados. Route 58c runs from Parnell Square West to Dún Laoghaire, and goes via Foxrock Church on the way. It’s a bus for people that enjoy a spin, clearly – how much better it would have suited Liam Reilly than the 46A during that famous summer in Dublin. But the Bagatelle balladeer mightn’t have been able to catch it of course. Because the 58c runs but once a day – in the morning, it leaves Dún Laoghaire at 7:35, and then returns, from Parnell Square West, at 5:17 in the evening. There is no service on Saturday or Sunday. Why is that?

Route 51 is remarkable for not having a return route. Five times between half-six and nine-thirty in the morning the 51 brings commuters in from Neilstown to Aston Quay. And then just leaves them there, apparently. Why isn’t there a return route? What’s the grand plan behind all this?

Route 86 is one of those buses that is rarely seen. It runs in the deep south, from Shankill to the Sandyford Industrial Estate at twenty-five past seven every Monday to Friday. One of very few similarities between the denizens of Shankill and Neilstown is that, like Neilstown’s 51, the 86 doesn’t seem to have a return route either. Why?

These are just some of the highlights of course – true busmen simply need to say “78” or “142” or even, God help us, “70x” to each other during the Friday night post work pints to reduce the company to tears of laughter. What is sweeter than the in-joke?

Someone once said that, to truly understand James Joyce’s Ulysses, you needed a working knowledge of the Dublin tram system of June 16th, 1904. Reader, imagine the modernist masterpiece that could be written by someone who can figure out the bus routes?





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, Bus Routes, Commuting

Jugular Train - Ballina Locomotive Discovers the World Beyond Manulla

An Spailpín Fánach has written before of the boundless courage and impossible spirit of daring that is the birthright of the Ballinaman. The events of the train journey from Ballina to Dublin last Saturday simply added further lustre to that fundamental truth.

As far as Irish Rail are concerned, Ballina is like Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon – it exists somewhere off in the mists, and can damned well stay there, as far as our masters are concerned. The train to Mayo runs from Dublin to Castlebar and Westport – fine towns both – while Ballina is served by a spur connection that runs from Ballina town to a block of concrete in a field in the townland on Manulla, about three miles north-west of the great town of Balla. The commuters descend from the Ballina train onto this block of concrete, and then board the Westport train all the way to Dublin. And vice versa on the way back.

Because it’s a spur line, the rolling stock on this route isn’t of the first water. It usually consists of a clapped out old locomotive and two carriages – if it were a car, it would be a Ford Cortina Mark IV, and two fluffy dice would hang from the mirror.

Last Saturday, that dauntless old locomotive and her two carriages chugged out of Ballina on her way east to the city. As the train approached Manulla, the commuters heard dread news on the PA. The train from Westport had been suspended due to “operational difficulties.” Hearts sank in the carriages, as the normally procedure in these not-at-all-uncommon circumstances is to put everyone in the train on a bus at Claremorris and send them off that way.

Imagine, then, the thrill that ran though the people when the driver continued his announcement: because the Westport train was suspended, that clapped out old Ballina train wasn’t going to stop at Manulla this time and slink back home again. She was going all the way to Dublin.

The train drove through Manulla without even slowing down as women wept and strong men clenched their teeth. The light brigade at Balaclava can have felt no more electric a thrill as they began their charge for the Russian guns. At Claremorris, the driver announced that there would be no “dining car” on this trip, none of that fancy-smancy “food” or “beverages.” The commuters were given five minutes at Claremorris to stock up on minerals and Mars bars, something they attended to with alacrity, and then off again on their gallant trip east.

Leaving the heather county at Ballyhaunis and cutting a swathe through Roscommon, the steadfast heart of Ireland, the scale of the undertaking became clear. The Westport train is normally blessed with eight to ten carriages. The Ballina train had but two, and carriages of a vintage that if one were to find Charters and Caldicott inside one of them discussing the cricket a person couldn’t be a bit surprised. But the two carriages were only meant to carry the Ballina contingent; now they had to carry the commuting population from all towns between the western Atlantic shores and the city of Dublin along that particular rail line.

Things quickly became crowded on the train. On leaving Mayo, the people were, quite frankly, crushed in a heap together. In Roscommon, a situation similar to the infamous black hole of Calcutta had arisen on the train. And after she crossed the broad majestic Shannon, the commuters waiting on the platforms recoiled in horror, staring at the windows of the train which now seemed to offer a glimpse into a nightmare vision from Hieronymous Bosch or Picasso’s Guernica, human forms crushed almost beyond recognition, heads the far side of shoulders, legs where arms should be, and even some people with the eyes moved to the one side of their heads from the squeeze of humanity.

And that’s what that Ballina commuter train looked like when she finally rolled into Heuston on Saturday – like a Mark IV Cortina driving up O’Connell Street, great clouds of smoke and steam coming from under the bonnet, and every single member of the Croke Park Residents’ Association jammed into the back. And there’s a lot of them.

An Spailpín Fánach doesn’t know what happened that train after her epic journey east. I do know that the passengers untangled and disembarked, and then went about their business in the city, including the one who drank the sweet porter with your correspondent in Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street on Saturday night and told the grand tale. It’s possible that the old locomotive chugged her last, and then just fell down in a heap in Heuston, and could be there yet. But chances are she just took a fill of green diesel and headed back home again, to rest peacefully by the banks of the Moy until she hears the bugle once more.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Ballina, Mayo, commuting, Irish Rail

Irish Rail Redefine Laws Governing Space, Time and the Physical Universe

It's no wonder that Irish rail are having trouble getting that Bolshevik down in Cork to drink his pint of salt and respond to the driver's lash. It seems they have considerably bigger fish to fry.

Your faithful narrator of contemporary Irish life was on the DART last week, and spotted a remarkable poster on the wall of the carriage. Irish railways were never noted for their ability for arriving on time, of course. You may remember Percy French’s thoughts on the matter, or perhaps the discussion of the steam-men at the start of The Quiet Man. But this new poster takes the biscuit, plate and all. It does nothing less than subvert the very laws of physics themselves, challenging all we understand about the fundamental nature of the universe.

The poster features a picture of a conductor conducting an orchestra. Below that, there is a green field with black lettering. The lettering reads:

DART SERVICES
Reliability 99.8%
Punctuality 93.3%

At this point, the eyebrow should be rising in proportion to the dropping of the jaw. It’s the decimal points in the percentages, you see – so reminiscent of the elections in the halcyon days in Iraq, when Saddam would win by 99.8% of the vote, the .2% showing that Iraq was indeed a free society. At the bottom of the poster, the small print says that the statistics are independently verified. It does not say by whom. Could there be something in this?

There is no need, however, to petition the Government under the Freedom of Information Act to find out just who has been doing Irish Rail’s 'rithmetic. The problem is much worse than that. Because, just above that small print, Irish Rail defines what it means by punctuality.

Punctuality, as defined by Irish Rail, means arriving at the destination not later than ten minutes after the scheduled time.

Not on time. Within ten minutes of being on time is what Irish Rail defines as punctual.

How astonishing. The problem is even worse than is immediately obvious, as a glance at the schedule will immediately make apparent. A train leaves Dublin Connolly every morning at 8:27, arriving at Lansdowne Road at 8:36. This is a nine minute journey, one minute less the ten minutes bounded by Irish Rail’s definition of “punctual.” And that means that, as far as Irish Rail are concerned, when the train is still at Dublin Connolly, it is also and at the same time at Dublin Tara Street, Dublin Pearse, Grand Canal Dock and Lansdowne Road. Simultaneously.

Has anybody alerted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about this extra-ordinary local phenomenon in Dublin, Ireland, where finite matter (a train) exists in multiple space (five different train stations, about a mile and a half apart) at the same point in time? Somebody ought to - a great jagged hole in the space-time continuum like that is exactly the sort of stuff they’re interested in at MIT. Dr Einstein famously posited a scenario where time was like a stream, and a traveller traveling at almost light speed could in theory leave his boat, walk back along the bank of the stream and meet himself on the way down. But one senses even that great man would have to throw his hat at what's going on in Irish Rail's particularly peculiar physics laboratory.

This view of material reality would suggest that Ireland is sitting at the edge of a vortex into another parallel dimension, that will completely revolutionise the way we understand the physical world, the universe and humanity’s place in it. It's no wonder that Irish Rail cannot deal with simple industrial relations when they're so busy trying to take on the very laws of physics themselves, the ancient bonds which hold material reality together, the very stuff of the universe itself. Who'd be bothered putting smacht on some Red when you've all that quantum physics in the inbox?






Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, commuting, DART, Irish Rail

Mystery Trains

Two cities, both alike in dignity, on either side of the Atlantic where we set our scene. But it seems the public transport authorities of Chicago and Ireland have differing views of how to handle breakdowns.

On Wednesday of this week, both the Chicago Transport Authority and Irish Rail suffered a mishap. In Chicago, a train coming in from the airport got stuck in a tunnel downtown. In Dublin, the Sligo train got stuck at Clonsilla, a north-western suburb, blocking the Maynooth commuter route.

In Chicago, the mishap happened at ten past eight, and normal service was restored by noon. In Dublin, the mishap happened at noon, and normal service was cancelled for the entire day.

The Chicago Transit Authority says their fault was mechanical, while Irish Rail says theirs was a signalling error. An Spailpín Fánach has no reason to doubt either. But the reaction to the outage on either side of the Atlantic is instructive.

In Chicago, not only did the CTA make the Blue Line trains free for the evening, to make it up to their customers, it didn’t even make a big deal of the gesture – it’s the final sentence in the press release on their site.

In Dublin, what did Irish Rail do? A big fat nothing, as far as I can see. Like they always do. Public transport authorities in this country like to say, when confronted by the latest commuting horror in the city, that this is the price of progress. No, it’s not. This is the price of being lazy and complacent. They have a recorded announcement at the stations where “Iarnród Éireann would like to apologize to all their passengers for any inconvenience caused.” The Chicago Transit Authority was sorry enough to reimburse commuters. That level of remorse has yet to manifest at Irish Rail.





Technorati Tags: politics, commuting, Irish Rail, Chicago Transit Authority, Dublin, Chicago

What Dublin Bus Really Thinks of the Commuter

An Spailpín Fánach is seldom a man to attack reading, that most wonderful and endlessly rewarding of hobbies. This evening, I am making a very special exception.

I took the above picture a little after six o’clock tonight. Sleet and snow arrived in the city this evening – great flakes of snow that melt immediately on impact and that leave you drenched and freezing in seconds. In the ten minutes it took me to walk from the office to the bus stop I was soaked, perished and eager to get somewhere warm.

Dublin Bus, however, had other ideas for me.

There was a queue of maybe ten people waiting for the bus. There were two buses at the stop. You’ll notice that the lights are on in the bus in the picture, the engine is running and the radiators are on. Did the driver open the doors to let the people on? No. He did not.

As far as he was concerned, the people waiting IN THE SNOW could damn well stay there. Eventually, once his thirst for literature was sated, this constant reader switched off the out of service sign, put up the correct number and opened the door.

You see, even though the “Out of Service” sign was lit, the bus was not “out of service” at all. It was the driver that was out of service. He was going to read his buke and anyone out in the cold could damn well stay there and catch ever damn type of pneumonia going. He didn’t care.

And do you know what puts the tin hat on it for me? He’s only starting the damn book. It’s not like Rudolf Rassendyll is facing a final, deadly showdown with the inexpressibly evil Rupert of Hentzau in the dark dungeons of the Castle of Zenda and this bus driver can’t wait, just can’t wait, to find out what happens next. He’s just acting out of principle, and that principle is that any Dublin bus driver can do what he damn well pleases and nuts to commuters freezing in the snow. Isn’t that why Joe Hill was shot, so Dublin Bus drivers wouldn’t have to suffer torment and slavery by opening the doors on a bus before they're good and damn well ready?

An Spailpín Fánach has edited the pic as I don’t want to personalise this about the driver concerned. He might have only just learned how to read for all I know, and can’t get enough of it. But everyone involved in fostering this culture in Dublin Bus, the culture that says the drivers do what they damn well like when they damn well like and only if they damn well like ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, commuting, books

On Reading and Commuting

There’s a lovely article by MJ Iles in this morning’s Guardian about reading and commuting. One of the many scandals about the current Celtic tiger inspired rapine of Galway, that one-time Emerald City, is that the only possible way to commute to work is to drive. This means that the only thing one has to distract the mind from the stresses inherent in driving is the radio, either the continually depressing news and worse, weather, on Morning Ireland, or else the unspeakable aural sewage on the quickly sinking ship that was once Fabulous 2FM. The horror, the horror.

Miserable and all as Dubbalin may be, at least you can read your book while on the DART or the bus. You might in material reality be sharing a perch on the 46A with some highly tattooed and malodorous recidivist habitual offender on day release from that Big House opposite the Mater, but your soul is in a hunting lodge in the forests of Ruritania, looking honest Colonel Zapt and noble Captain von Tarlenheim in the eye and saying dash it all, I’ll do it! How much more stimulating than listening to cretin calling to cretin, giving great shout-outs to all the gang that echo indeterminably through the ages in the barren and sterile chasms between their ears? Very much more stimulating, I’m sure.

But what book to choose? MJ Iles suggests a heuristic that matches the length of book with the length of commute, but An Spailpín contends this to be a dangerous and limiting strategy. It all depends on your ability to switch your imagination on and off – to move, in one swift moment, from the Ruritinian forest to the act of removing your companion’s hand from your pocket, politely remarking “my stop, I think” before strolling into work, and then being able to return to that Ruritanian forest after eight hours’ graft in the name of Mammon and mortgage. Once you’ve mastered this technique, 2000 years of literature is yours to peruse. Happy days.

It is An Spailpín’s contention that the question of title and size are of far more import than the question of length. That book in your fist is as a calling card that will announce to all the world just who you are and what you stand for. For instance, as the DART pulls into the station and you eye the crowd for the best position to adopt in order to lead the charge on board, may I suggest that you position yourself next to such commuters as are clutching Dan Brown novels in their hands? Their choice of literature indicates that these will not be the quickest out of the traps when the train disgorges its commuters, and you will be able to quickly board while their brains, such as they are, are desperately trying to get word to the feet that now, now is the hour.

Of course, in order to be well read, you too will need to slum it a little while, or else simply relax and enjoy a book off after a hard week’s labour figuring out just what happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire. An Spailpín makes no apologies for his taste for the impossible pulp of Ian Fleming and Peter O’Donnell (and how odd it is to see Fleming in Penguin Classics!), but I can certainly understand that discretion may be the best option when going on capers with Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. I don’t Harry Potter myself, but I have no problem with those that do, after reading Victoria Coren’s lovely little piece in the Guardian recently. We all need a break every now and again. However, while you hunch over your ripe copy of The Silver Mistress, it’s hard to resist the impulse to behave contrarywise, holding your copy of The Master and Margarita proudly above your head, to show just what a literate and cool kitty you are. A pretty lady complimented your correspondent on his choosing of Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music on the 15B into Rathmines once; it remains a life highlight. The book is ok too (although roundly despised by a friend of mine who would know more of that strange world than I).

Of course, of even greater practical consideration than the title – slumming with Peter O’Donnell or high-living with F Scott Fitzgerald – is the question of the size of the book. It has long been a point of distress with this constant reader that paperback books, designed to be small, are now so damned big. The ideal commuting book is the size of one of the old orange Penguins from the forties, that can discretely be slipped into the jacket pocket once the bus has stopped, and withdrawn again on the journey home. This works less well with the modern paperback, whith in size seems so reminiscent of the old quarto sizes, only not as prettily bound, of course. This has been such a source of distress to An Spailpín that, in my civilian capacity, I once wrote to Faber and Faber to ask them why they printed their paperbacks so damned big. I got a long and lovely email back from someone in the company explaining that the large paperback size is essentially a compromise between the hardback size without the extra bulk of the hard covers, and the cheaper cost of producing the paperback. To my eternal shame I never replied to that kind man who took the time to write to me – I hope that, if through some process of synchronicity, he reads this blog, he can accept my apology for my unforgivable rudeness.

The final, and perhaps final, argument in favour of the paperback of classic dimensions is that it is so much easier to sneak into the office bathroom when one is considering a longer stay than the straightforward splash and go. In an office populated entirely by gentlemen, to proudly march away with the morning’s Irish Times under the oxter doesn’t cost a thought, but one can’t help but think such a display creates the wrong impression among the discrete sex. In an office where your correspondent once turned a shilling there was a roomy cupboard in the thunder room, a cupboard into which I could and did discretely stash a slim volume of Tennyson – the Dover Thrift Edition, you know. Marvellous, and only two clams. Sadly, An Spailpín has moved up in world, and the new office is more like something out of Gattaca, leaving no place for my Lord Tennyson, his lotus eaters or the six hundred. And they call this progress?





Technorati Tags: culture, books, reading, commuting

Commuting

There's a long - the guts of seven thousand words, give or take - article about commuting in the current New Yorker that's quite thought-provoking. We here in Ireland might like to print it out and have a read of it over the weekend, to know what we've got to look forward to before the old pension fund kicks in. Enjoy the weekend. And try to make the most of it - it doesn't last.





Technorati Tags: culture, commuting, traffic, New Yorker