Part 1: ORK-DUB on IrishRail
or: The most productive part of my day
While I've been more or less stuck with EI for the last little while, Irish Rail has recently dropped the prices for their Cork-Dublin daytime services to €20 O/W, meaning it's suddenly not such a bad idea to take the train up to Dublin and connect that way, especially if I can avoid paying the baggage overage charges on EI to LHR by going with *A. The benefit of the low-cpm 500 miles to Aeroplan also helps quite a bit in making this decision. And if it's just me flying, then there's really no question where I'm going to go. So I diverted from my normal evening flights out of ORK and took the afternoon off to hop a train to Dublin.
Thankfully, Cork is fantastically easy to get around, even during midday, but with two big bags to carry I started walking to the station with the intetion of flagging down the first cab I found. It was more or less halfway there before I found a free cab, but it did save a few minutes on the way to the station. I still made it there with time to spare, however, and got my prebooked seat 5. With seat 6, these are the only seats with a power port in the standard coaches.
Irish Rail from Cork to Dublin: Showing up early meant that I was the first on the train, although it remained pretty empty all the way to Limerick Junction.
Seat 1 on the Intercity. Note: Seat 5 and 6 are the only ones which have a power port in standard class, as well as being nearest the luggage rack. Book accordingly.
The coach remained fairly empty all the way up to Dublin, with quite a few people boarding at Macroom and Limerick Junction, but nobody took any of the seats around me so I was able to get some space to work and catch up on some shows I've been meaning to see. Oddly, the combination was strangely productive for work and I was able to get through a huge pile of thesis corrections, as well as fixing some issues I'd been having with a few device models. If anything, it was the most productive three hours of my week, although it was soon time to pack up as we pulled into Heuston. The only thing that had changed since I was last there was the addition of the ticket-validation machines (which incidentally did not work to let me out anyway, however they had a staff member on hand to anticipate this failure and let us out).
On the outside, though Dublin has managed to sync their train arrivals and bus schedules relatively well, and bus 748 to the airport was sitting outside the station waiting for us and in less than half an hour we were up at the airport, where T2 has progressed quite a bit since I'd last been through. The roads are now much more aligned like they will eventually be, although it's not quite there. T2 is progressing along really nicely, and it will certainly be interesting to give it a try once everything's finished next year.
Arriving at DUB on the Dublin Bus Airlink service. New T2 construction is everywhere these days
Thoughts on the trip: I really do enjoy the train in Ireland, especially since they upgraded the coaches. While it's not nearly as convenient as RE up to DUB, the new fares make it a really viable alternative to the bus. Reading a few Irish railroad forums also helped when determining where to sit, as having a power plug on seats 5 and 6 was a great advantage, especially with a laptop that doesn't have a fantastic battery life. Still my strong second choice for going up to Dublin, if RE isn't having a seat sale that day.
Next Time: DUB-LHR on BD