Irish Rail received more than 10,400 complaints in the first eleven months of last year about service disruption, anti-social behaviour, accessibility, and racism.
Complaints lodged included trains departing too early, menacing scooters “flying down” station ramps, “sexual innuendo” from male passengers, and carriages that were “alarmingly hot”.
Almost three-quarters of the complaints related to inter-city services with 2,682 individual complaints about “onboard issues”.
Overall, across inter-city, commuter, and DART services, there were just over 2,300 complaints about service disruption, 3,120 about onboard issues, and 919 concerning fares and ticketing.
There were another 1,354 complaints about Irish Rail’s website, 1,678 about station issues, and 381 complaints about staffing issues.
Irish Rail also recorded 374 complaints about anti-social behaviour between January and November last year as well as 190 regarding timetabling.
There were six complaints as well about racism, and 84 about accessibility issues, often people with disabilities struggling to gain access to a rail service or a station.
Of the six complaints about racism, two of them took place on DART trains while four were reported on intercity services.
A sample of complaints from November last year reveal issues around cancelled services, trains that were too warm, refunds, and poor upkeep of train stations.
In one, a passenger wrote of a “guy on [a] scooter flying down the ramp” at Connolly Station and said it was a regular occurrence.
One complaint said a service from Bray to Dublin had left “almost four minutes early” leaving two people stranded at the station.
Another wrote: “When are Irish Rail going to deal with the number of bicycles and scooters on train services, they constantly block the aisles and passage-ways; are you waiting until people lose their lives on board?”
There were multiple complaints about heat with one asking if the driver could kindly turn it off on a Drogheda-bound service “before someone passes out”.
Another complaint said: “DART carriage … needs the heaters fixed, it’s like an oven in there and the seats can be too hot to sit on … [another carriage] smells like pi**.”
In one, a female passenger said she felt the pedestrian exit from a station on Clontarf Road was “extremely unsafe”.
She wrote: “The narrow pathway is hemmed in by a high fence on one side and a temporary netting because of current works in the car park. The two streetlights above it are not working. So, you are forced to walk a long dark lane with no escape until you reach the main road.
“The station is unmanned, and you are completely hidden from view. A man walking behind me actually waited and let me walk ahead as it was clear that it was a very scary situation to be in as a woman.”
In another, a parent wrote about how their daughter was on a service involving a transfer but when she arrived, the train was already gone, and the station was empty.
Her daughter was “very distressed to say the least”, said the complaint and ended up paying more than €100 to complete her journey by taxi.
In another incident, an eighteen-year-old female passenger was harassed with “sexual innuendo” by three male passengers on an intercity service.
“When she put her head down hoping they would ignore her, they got worse and kept calling the 'girl in the leopard hat we know that you can hear us', they did this over and over, and over again,” read the complaint.
In one complaint, a passenger suggested a driver had been sight-seeing so slowly was he driving their train.
They wrote: “The driver drove it too slow, slowing down multiple times for no reason. And the train never reached any sort of speed. It's as if the driver was on the train on his own, taking in the sights and unaware that there were people trying to get to work on time.”
A spokesman for Irish Rail said: “We regret any instance where customers did not experience a positive journey with us, and customer feedback assists us in ensuring we are acting on areas of priority for our customers.
“While a request for complaints will of course only yield complaints, it is worth noting that customer satisfaction in independent market research with our services remains strong, with the most recent NTA research across all modes showing 94% of customers are either very or fairly satisfied with train services, up from 92% in the previous survey.”
