History
The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) (GNR(I)) introduced the service as the "Enterprise Express" on 11 August 1947 in an attempt to compete with air and road transport which were challenging the railways. In particular, business travel was and is seen as an important market. Customs checks were limited to the Belfast and Dublin terminals in order to reduce journey times by ensuring that journeys were non-stop, and advance booking was available. Apparently the name of the train comes from "the enterprising approach" that the GNR(I) took to make journeys more convenient for passengers despite the requirement for customs checks. The initial service ran between Belfast Great Victoria Street station and Dublin Amiens Street station, which was renamed Dublin Connolly in 1966.
In October 1950 the service was extended beyond Dublin to Kent Station in Cork. This proved unsuccessful and the Cork link ceased in September 1953 when the governments of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland nationalised the GNR as the Great Northern Railway Board (GNRB). The Cork service's unpopularity may also have been due to the six and a half hour journey time.
On 1 October 1958 the GNRB was dissolved and its assets and liabilities were split between Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ) and the Ulster Transport Authority (UTA) — the predecessors of the current operators, Iarnród Éireann (IE) and Northern Ireland Railways (NIR) respectively. Following the completion of the Belfast Central Line Project, the Belfast terminal moved to the new Belfast Central station in April 1976.
The service was upgraded in September 1997 with a new timetable and new coaching stock from French train makers De Dietrich Ferroviaire (now Alstom DDF). At this point the service, which had operated under either the IÉ or NIR brands, was branded separately as Enterprise.
The service has suffered disruption over the years, particularly during the Troubles, when it was regularly halted by bomb threats. These became so frequent and caused such considerable disruption to the service that a campaigning group, the Peace Train Organisation was formed in 1989. Since the Northern Ireland peace process, however, such disruption has diminished. Renewed investment in recent years has seen the line upgraded to continuously welded track capable of 145 km/h (90 mph) running along the southern part of the route, as part of Iarnród Éireann's rail network upgrades. However, these speeds are not reached on the northern part of the route.
Timetable times vary between 1 hour 53 minutes (with one intermediate stop) and a more typical 2 hours 15 minutes (with four intermediate stops), an average speed of 97 and 81 km/h (60 and 50 mph) respectively.
The Railway Preservation Society of Ireland runs a Steam Enterprise in the summer months to exchange its Dublin-based engine with its Whitehead-based engine.
Read more about this topic: Enterprise Train Service
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe my ardour for invention springs from his loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)