Smaller trains, a planned cut to late night services, I don’t like the direction of travel Translink are on

There’s no point in having a £340m station in Belfast if train and bus services are going downhill

Belfast’s Grand Central Station epitomises what we want Northern Ireland to look like in 2026. It’s unquestionably an impressive symbol of the city, the kind of welcome you want tourists to get when their bus or train pulls into Belfast for the first time.

Compare it to the Dublin equivalent. Connolly Station is grubby, compact, located in a frankly undesirable part of the city, it’s somewhere to hurry in and out of.

Grand Central Station meanwhile cost an eye-watering £340 million to build with Marks and Spencer food outlet, several premium coffee outlets, a Brewdog and Boots. Bus and train stations are traditionally somewhere you don’t want to spend much time, but this is an exception. You can arrive early for your train and bus, and enjoy a pint or a coffee.

It’s also a world away from the creaking old Great Victoria Street Station. Gone are the days when you used to brave the wind and the rain at the height of winter waiting for a train home. With the proliferation of bays at Grand Central, train delays seem less common that they did before on the Lisburn line that I use to commute to the Belfast Live office.

But a direction of travel has been emerging over recent months and it’s taking us a less promising destination.

Translink, riddled in financial problems, has already said it needs to save £10m and the cutbacks include a cut to late-evening bus and rail services, between Mondays and Wednesdays.

As a snapshot of what that will look like, I attended the CMAT concert on Bank Holiday Monday in Custom House Square. If Translink get their way and the services finish at 10pm, I would have been looking at a taxi or a long walk home. Mind you, the hourly wait between trains on that Monday night wasn’t altogether impressive either.

If Belfast wants to be taken seriously as a nightlife destination, then cutting services on Ulsterbus, Metro and NI Railways isn’t an option.

The Portadown to Belfast railway line meanwhile is the busiest in Northern Ireland. Without doubt, the key times are the morning and evening rush hours. So why, since the schools returned in late August, has the quality of services in the morning peak taken a nosedive?

The least you expect when you turn up for a direct service to Belfast at rush hour is for the service to be as it says on the tin. Lisburn is the busiest station on the route, and yet on numerous occasions during September, passengers arriving for the 8.06am direct service to Grand Central Station have been told that the service has been reduced to just three carriages.

So either you attempt to scramble your way through the crush and squeeze your way onto the 8.06am, or take the alternative all-stops service. What’s the big deal you might ask? Well one service is scheduled to take nine minutes, the other is closer to half an hour. Standing room only is ok for nine minutes, half an hour, not so much.

It reached a nadir on Tuesday morning when passengers were told that they weren’t allowed to board the 8.06am train because it was already full.

The worrying thing has been the Translink reponses to my queries. No confirmation that this is a one-off, a warning that ‘on occasion’ the capacity of services will be reduced. Well unfortunately those occasions have been far too common for everyone’s liking so far since the schools returned.

I used the same service on Wednesday and Thursday and the relief was palpable among my fellow passengers when the proper service pulled in.

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