The Feckin Trains Again

Unfortunatly its time for another rant about the state of Dublin's public transport. I'm going to limit myself to talking about the trains as I use them way more than buses and well, I've given up on the buses. A few years back, when the phrase "Celtic Tiger" didn't sound ironic, the much maligned and cash strapped Irish Rail finally got a big boost from the National Development plan which (I don't know the ins and outs) basically gave them a load of cash for a few years to spruse things up a bit. They've probably improved whole sections of the rail infrastructure that I don't notice, but the stuff I do notice is still a load of crap. But here's where I've seen the money spent: The Trains: they have bought in and are continuing to buy a whole load of new carriages for the DART, all with digital displays on the inside and out for the first time. Yet most of the time the displays on the outside are off, the destination written on the front and back of the train is wrong, and the display inside showing the next station etc. is off. I mean, how hard can it be to get this stuff working? After 5 years too... The Platform Displays: I can't believe how long it took to get these put up, but as soon as they were they looked antiquated. Huge red LED's with only two lines, half the time broken or the glass cracked. And as soon as the sun shines on them you can't read anything. The Ticket Gates: Unfortunatly no effort has been made to update these. Still of the old turnstyle variety, it takes a good few seconds for the ticket to process through the machine. But what bothers me most about these machines is to do with.. The Ticket Collectors: For some ridiculous reason, when getting off at the three city centre DART stations, where queue's are the longest, you can't put your ticket through the gate to leave the station..you have to have it validated by a ticket collector. The really pisses me off because the ticket gates are clearly able to take the tickets from both sides, yet someone somewhere has decided that they will not use the machines, preferring to do the who thing manually and thus slow everyone down. The slots for the tickets are even taped over with paper. Not to mention the added bonus of watching the ticket guy searching his pockets for change there and then when someone tries to pay for a ticket. Un feckin real. The Ticket Machines: Only introduced in the city centre stations a couple of years ago, everybody is supposed to be impressed because they're touch screens. What a load of crap - the amount of menu selections you have to go through to get your ticket is just silly, not to mention that they have to put a sign on them saying "Please allow coin to drop before putting in another". You'd think that, being a computer screen, they'd be able to update the display if there was a delay in trains or if they weren't stopping at certain stations but no. They still have hand scralled messages taped on the machine to tell you that their out of order, which is all too often.