History of Maytró
“Maytró” is a reboot of “Mayolink”, an idea developed by Frank Dawson, a native of Claremorris and the former CEO of Roscommon County Council.
I met Frank as part of an eclectic group of students, railway enthusiasts, environmentalists, business people, rail-freight professionals, local politicians and activists who came together in 2002 to fight the latest attempt (at that time) to close regional railways in Ireland, including the Ballina line.
It was the height of the Celtic tiger and Iarnród Éireann (IÉ), under pressure to get into property development, decided to wind up their profitable rail freight services to free up land for property speculation. Lines that were open primarily for freight, like the Ballina branchline, were for the chop 1.
Thankfully the lobby effort was successful (unfortunately a line in Wexford was later closed under the cover of the post-GFC austerity regime) and Frank and other members of the group even managed to usher in Ireland’s first private rail services since nationalization, carrying freight traffic from Ballina to Dublin and Waterford.
Not satisfied with mere survival, Frank saw an opportunity to improve on the status quo further. Back then the Ballina branch train was still pulled by a locomotive which meant that at the end of each trip the engine needed to be turned around. As there were no facilities to do this at the junction of the Dublin and Ballina lines it instead ran up and down to the next station (Claremorris) empty for each train, fully staffed. A “ghost train” as Frank termed it in his proposal. IÉ happened to have a couple of unused railcars in their rolling stock and Frank’s argument was, why not take one of these railcars and run it up and down between Westport and Ballina, instead of the empty trains? The staff were there, the rolling stock was there, the infrastructure was there, all sunk costs. Why not just provide a service?
As Westontrack was kicking off its own campaign and Frank was busy with that, he passed the Mayolink torch to myself somewhat. To be honest I can’t remember the timeline exactly but with the help of a couple of mavericks who pushed the idea initially - Billy Lewis in the Ballina IRD and Jerry Cowley, the independent TD for Mayo - a delegation of sorts was put together to meet the then Minister of Transport, Séamus Brennan, to put the case for Mayolink to him. The description ‘maverick’ seems appropriate here because the idea of regional public transport, in the context of the tiger milieu where the State was financing a privately owned motorway network and car ownership was exploding seemed incongruous to many people.
I was training as an accountant at the time so I was given the task of putting together some figures that made the economic case for the service, not a hard task given the circumstances. I included some references to the recently published National Spatial Strategy 2 which, amongst other concerns, explictly tied the development of Ballina and Castlebar towns together and that was my contribution, more or less.
We met Séamus Brennan in the department buildings in 2003 and gave our presentations. The only record I can find of this event is a reference in a speech by Jerry Cowley which I believe I wrote for him, at least in part 3. As I recall the Minister was whisked into the room flanked by bookish civil servants, who briefed him theatrically as we presented, refering him to passages in a large blue tome (the original Strategic Rail Review). There followed a consumate, efficacious speech thanking us for our contributions, some handshakes and an invitation to partake in the refreshments at the back of the room. And that was that, or so I thought.
In fact Mayolink did finally come into being in 2007 with the arrival of a railcar in Ballina and the new timetable 4. If you read Jerry Cowley’s original speech on the matter 3 you can get an outline of what kind of service that had been advocated. Something with local branding, community run, direct from Ballina to Westport, marketed etc, etc. The service that was ultimately delivered could kindly be described as a “do-minimum” effort. Zero marketing, basically no acknowledgement that the service even existed, only connecting trains (and some very poor connections at that) and an unaffordable price, 15.90 euro one way, if memory serves, basically the same price as to Dublin.
Years later, a friend of mine ended up serving on the board of IÉ and I asked about the pricing algorithm used for the line. He rejoined that there was no algorithm, that everything was done by hand still and that although the pricing boffins had never heard of the Ballina Westport service, they would look into it. I don’t know if it was by his intervention (thanks James!) or pure coincidence but the price was adjusted to a more reasonable amount, today around 7.50 euro, and I can happily report from personal experience, having recently returned to Ireland myself, that “Mayolink” does indeed exist and is being used.
An Maightreo go deo!