Iarnrod Eireann: Punctuality and the small print

I was standing around the train station in Athenry this afternoon, with a few minutes to kill while I was waiting for the 13:30 from Galway, and as you do, I got bored and started reading the advertisements. One of them is that "Timing is Everything" ad where they tell you how close the service is to being on time, every time. For the Dublin-Galway line, this is apparently "100% Reliability", 91% Punctuality". Then tho, having the time to do it, I did something that not many people probably do: I noticed the asterisk on the word "punctuality" and then read the small print at the bottom which tells you what that means. Apparently, for Irish rail, punctuality means "arriving at the destination no more than 10 minutes late". TEN minutes? On the continent if a train is more than 2-3 minutes late you get all sorts of apologies! Irish Rail aren't exactly setting themselves a stretch goal here are they? And what's worse is that on the galway line, they don't even meet this rather generous timeline, of being in less than 10mins late on a 3hr journey. So 1 time in 10, they overshoot by 3% of the journey time and it's OK. I wish my boss was this lenient on my deadlines!

And what exactly does "100% Reliable" mean as well? They always get to the right place? So what they're saying there is that "The train that is supposed to go to Galway actually gets to Galway, as opposed to say accidentally ending up in Cork or Limerick, every time!". You'd be sort of fucking worried if it didn't wouldn't you? Or is it that "the train that is supposed to leave platform 2 in Galway station at 5pm that has a sign up saying it's going to Dublin can be 100% relied on to go to Dublin at some stage"? Again, we're not talking about heart surgery or a mission to Mars here, this sort of reliability should be a given as opposed to them boasting about it! Is sort of like boasting "our staff manage to get their shoes on the right feet first time every morning, aren't they great?"

And what's worse is that I've seen this "X% Reliability, X% Punctuality" signs on DART stations before, and they don't manage the 100% punctuality every time. I didn't pay this much attention before, but now I know what it is, bloody hell! So say the trains to Tara St are 98% punctual. That means that a service that's supposed to run every 5-10 minutes is late by more than 10mins 2% of the time. So basically, 2% of they time they're effectively skipping 1 or 2 whole trains! Where are these missing trains going? And what about their passengers? So as well as the Dublin DART Doppler Effect (where the pronunciation of a train heading south goes "deert, deert, daart, daart, dart, dart, dahrt, dahrt, dort"), we have a "DART Triangle", where trains just go missing? Where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?