How will Irish Rail keep trains running after firing company behind new signalling system?

Just after 8.30am on May 29th last, Irish Rail warned passengers via its social media channels they were going to face significant delays to train services across large parts of the network.There was, the State-owned rail operator said, a “major signal fault across the suburban network”. For about 30 minutes during the morning rush hour, rail services were suspended, affecting the Dart in Dublin as well the busy northern commuter line from Drogheda and trains using the Phoenix Park tunnel linking the city and west Dublin and Kildare, along with the Rosslare and Sligo routes. The disruption was caused by a fault at the Irish Rail control centre at Connolly Station in Dublin city.The train network relies not just on tracks and carriages. Signalling is crucial to control the movements of trains carrying hundreds of passengers, particularly on the congested routes into Dublin city and on large portions of the network where there are only single tracks. READ MOREIrish Rail had been working on updating its system for controlling train movements for years as the existing system was considered to be on the brink of obsolescence. Irish Rail chief executive Mary Considine told the Oireachtas Committee on Transport in June that the central traffic control technology in use at the facility at Connolly was “life-expired” and no longer supported by the developer. The rail operator had been working on introducing a new traffic management system (TMS) that would integrate signals, communications and other systems on the railway network for more than a decade but the project experienced extensive delays. The problems experienced on May 29th showed, albeit for 30 minutes – the disruption that could be caused by an ageing control system. Considine told the committee the planned new control system would not now be in place for the foreseeable future. Irish Rail and the Department of Transport have interim plans to shore up the existing arrangements, particularly to cover the busy Greater Dublin Area in the absence of a complete new system.[ Dispute over failed Irish Rail IT project could end up in courtOpens in new window ]Irish Rail insists safety is its priority. Considine said if serious control problems emerged, it would shut down parts of the network affected. “There would be interruptions to services but safety would not be compromised,” she said.Passengers would face potential significant disruptions, Paul Hendrick, director of capital investments at Irish Rail, told the committee. “If the system goes down, it will pose a challenge in terms of service levels. We may have to operate in a degraded mode. We would not be able to run our normal, full timetable. It is more of an operational impact on the services we offer to customers.”Less than a fortnight before the system fault on May 29th, the long-running saga over the replacement control system essentially reached the end of the line. Twelve years earlier, Irish Rail had approved a €500,000 budget for a proposal to update its then central traffic control system. The IT project, known as a traffic management system (TMS) was to be a subset of a new overall national train control centre at Heuston Station, which was approved by the government in 2019. The contract for the design, supply, installation and commissioning of the new system and control equipment was agreed with Spanish multinational IT company Indra Sistemas in 2020. The project was expected to cost €19.5 million including VAT, with a target that the new TMS would be commissioned by June 2024.However, the project was beset by delays and cost overruns. The final straw for Irish Rail came in April when the company maintained the latest software delivered by Indra failed a number of key tests. On May 6th, the board of Irish Rail wrote down by €50 million the value of its investment in the national train control centre, due to the problems with the TMS. On May 18th, the company sent its accounts for 2025 to Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien. A note in the accounts said Irish Rail, informed by the test results to date, “does not have confidence that the asset in the current state can be deployed for use on the network”. Three days later The Irish Times revealed details of the €50 million writedown, leading to fury on the part of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC).It emerged that Indra had received about €28 million from Irish Rail for its work on the TMS. However, in addition the rail company had also spent about €20 million on third-party costs and other project supports, including a significant amount on external consultants. The board of the National Transport Authority (NTA) – which provided the funding for the TMS – commissioned consultants EY to investigate what had gone wrong. Quickly it became clear that Irish Rail and Indra have different versions of the background to what PAC chairman John Brady of Sinn Féin described as a “national scandal”.Considine told the Oireachtas Committee on Transport that six years after the contract was signed and two years after the original commissioning date for the TMS, “Indra still does not have a developed product fit for deployment on our rail network, and it remains in a product development cycle”.[ Irish Rail fires IT firm behind much-delayed project and prepares to seek damages amid €50m writedownOpens in new window ]The board of Irish Rail had been told by management that it could be the summer of next year before the first phase of the project – covering the Dublin-Rosslare line – would be introduced and that it could be well into the 2030s before the full system was operational.Indra, for its part, has blamed Irish Rail for how it has handled the project. In a lengthy statement to The Irish Times, it said Irish Rail had depended too heavily on external advisers, mainly from abroad.Indra also said that critical knowledge about the unique characteristics and limitations of the Irish Rail network had neither been comprehensively documented nor systematically shared with the project team. It said key Irish Rail personnel who would use the planned system had not been actively involved in the project until its fifth year. “Indra was required to design the solution without visibility of infrastructure behaviours that materially affected system performance,” it said. Indra said it had made every effort to deliver the project.“Irish Rail did not or was unable to collaborate on the implementation of the TMS in a way that would be considered standard for operators in other countries. For the first five years of the contract, the absence of effective sponsorship from Irish Rail coupled with its failure to appoint and empower suitably qualified internal technical experts to assume leadership of the project created a significant governance and oversight gap,” Indra said. The statement came as The Irish Times was about to reveal that the board of Irish Rail had fired Indra.In late June, following a meeting of its board, Irish Rail management wrote to the NTA seeking approval to end the contract with Indra. This was accepted by the NTA on July 13th and within a few days the rail operator told Indra it was invoking provisions in the contract to terminate the arrangement “for convenience”.However, Irish Rail has also been working on plans to sue Indra, leaving open the prospect or likelihood that the dispute over the TMS will end up in the courts.With the Indra software now seemingly off the pitch, there is a growing focus on what should happen next. Irish Rail, the NTA and politicians all agree that a new control system is needed.The NTA told the PAC that €20 million over three years may have to be spent to shore up the existing control systems in Dublin. This will be in addition to the €50 million writedown on the TMS system that Indra was to have delivered.“As a result of delays in the delivery of the TMS, the Minister for Transport has approved additional signalling works ... this year that will deliver additional signalling resilience on the busiest parts of the network around the Greater Dublin Area and mitigate the risk of a big failure of the existing central traffic control system at Connolly Station. An additional benefit of this investment is that it will ensure that envisaged future Dart+ services will be able to come on-stream in the coming years regardless of the delayed delivery of the TMS,” the NTA said.“These resilience works envisage reducing the load of the current train control centre system by migrating a number of ‘desks’ controlling parts of the network on to an alternative control system in the National Train Control Centre [the new facility at Heuston Station]. This will provide the additional control capacity needed for those particular parts of the network.“Expenditure on these resilience works is estimated at €5.7 million in 2026, €9.8 million in 2027 and €4.3 million in 2028,” the NTA said.The NTA also warned of other potential costs, particularly in relation to planned developments in Cork.[ Spending on rail expansion plans could be hit by costs of failed €50m IT projectOpens in new window ]“The current planned date for commissioning the new signalling system in Cork is August 2027. In advance of this signalling system being commissioned, it will be necessary to have developed a suitable TMS for the signalling to feed into. If there is a delay to the commissioning date for the Cork signalling system, this could lead to additional costs on the project including contractor delay claims and internal and external project management of up to €800,000 per month,” the NTA told the PAC.In parallel with terminating Indra’s contract, Irish Rail decided to look to another company, Siemens Mobility, to deliver a control system. But this needed the backing of the NTA.Irish Rail told the NTA it wanted to publish what is known as a voluntary ex-ante transparency (VEAT) notice to the market. This would set out its plans to award a direct contract to Siemens Mobility to deliver its system, known as Westcad, across its network without going through a procurement competition.The timing of NTA approval was important for Irish Rail’s strategy, in particular for dealing with Indra. There would be a 30-day window for any challenge to the VEAT notice. The company wanted to have this out of the way before it proceeded to issue a default notice regarding Indra’s performance. Irish Rail believed this had to be done by the middle of October. However, the NTA initially sought more information and then in July rejected the application by Irish Rail to publish the VEAT at that time. In August there was more correspondence between Irish Rail and the NTA. The NTA wanted more details surrounding Irish Rail’s plans. The rail operator was increasingly concerned that any breach-of-contract case against Indra had to be issued by October 15th. It was worried that Indra could challenge the VEAT notice about the contract to Siemens.Irish Rail considered it was essential the VEAT notice be issued by the first week in September to allow it to initiate its action against Indra in mid-October.In a statement this week, the NTA said Irish Rail had submitted an approval request in relation to proposed delivery arrangements for an alternative train control system. “This is currently the subject of engagement between Irish Rail and the NTA and involves a legal assessment of the procurement proposals. That process is ongoing.”While the forthcoming EY report is expected to deal with what happened in the past about the TMS project, in Leinster House there are concerns also about the future.The chairman of the Oireachtas transport committee, Michael Murphy of Fine Gael, said Ireland needs a modern, reliable TMS.“Urgency cannot become an excuse for simply moving on without establishing what went wrong. Approximately €50 million has already been written down on a system that was not delivered. We need to understand when it became clear the project was in serious difficulty, why expenditure continued despite repeated missed deadlines, and what lessons have been learned,” Murphy said. “My concern is that the failure of the previous TMS project cannot now be allowed to create a further bottleneck for the wider rail investment programme. I want clarity from Irish Rail and the NTA on what impact the failure and subsequent delays could have on Dart+ and other planned investments, and what measures are being taken to ensure those projects remain on track.”