Boyle to Sligo

11 July 2005


In today’s Irish Times Tim O’Brien gives us a brief history lesson on Ireland’s crappy transport system. He uses as an example Alice, who traveled from Boyle to Bray on the train 50 years ago, and says it took her the same amount of time to get from Boyle to Dublin as it does today, 3 hours.

Well I didn’t travel 50 years ago, but I remember it taking longer than 3 hours to get from Sligo to Dublin (Sligo is further away on the same line. It takes 30 mins or so to get to Boyle from Sligo). While I’ll agree that train-transport in Ireland is quite shite, it is not at bad as this article makes out.

And still the Sligo train chugs out of Connolly Station, covering the distance to Boyle in about three hours – as it did a half-a-century ago.

As for the rest of the article, well the roads really are that bad.

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2 Responses

  1. NineMoons says:

    Dude, that's like basic internet research! It takes 2 hours and 16 minutes to get to Boyle from Dublin by train. And I know for a fact that getting home to Sligo is a hell of a lot faster now than even five or six years ago when they were doing all that tearing up the line shite. It would be faster if they didn't stop at as many stations but that's not a big help to people in those towns. And we've always been very lucky to have so many trains – three a day up and down and two more on Sundays and Fridays in term. Plus the Monday red-eye. And it's nowhere near as expensive as going to Cork or Belfast.

  2. Fence says:

    Dude! Like totally!

    Sweet! etc etc etc