Speaking as a relatively uninformed outsider with little skin in the game - Irish railroads are very marginal to national transport policy - there seem to be a few larger meta problems.

1. The removal of financing responsibility from national to smaller regional authorities increases complexity and the number of negotiations which must be successfully concluded for any one project. It also reduces the possibility for tradeoffs between projects.

2. The lack of a robust over-arching EU transport policy and financing architecture - equivalent to a "single market" in transport makes relatively less complex road upgrades more attractive as they require less technical coordination and cooperative operation.

3. Austerian economics and free market dominated politics favour the elimination of visible subsidies and costly and long term infrastructural investments.

4. Economies of scale are more difficult in the complex and incompatible technical architecture of many different rail systems and their historical evolution. As a counter-example I give you Ryanair, which has just ordered 200 Boeing Jet aircraft, one of the largest ever commercial orders will be of a single type of plane from a single supplier operated in a single airspace regulatory and management system.

5. It seems to me that until we set up a sort of European Union of all rail infrastructural development and management companies, rail will continue to be riddled with technical incompatibilities, over-expensive and underdeveloped. When I traveled from Dublin to Bern some years ago, the Dublin Zurich flights cost less than the Zurich Bern rail link - and I wasn't traveling Ryanair. It turned out it would have been cheaper to have hired a car for the few days.

Don't get me wrong - I am all in favour of developing rail transport. It just seems to me we don't have the political, financial, managerial, and technical architectures in place to really develop it at a faster place than competing road and air transport systems.

Index of Frank's Diaries