I love trains. No, really, I do. In these pages, I have written about all manner of things that move you from one place to another, including cars and scooters, buses and bikes. But as much as I obsess over transportation forms, I have not yet written about my favourite – the train.
There are many great things about trains, chief among them being that a train is a reflection of the place where it is run. Tell me how a country runs its railways, and I will tell you what that country believes about itself, because the building of a train is too long, too expensive and too public to reflect anything other than the institutions that built it. Consider Japan, where the fastest trains on Earth were built by the slowest, most deliberate people imaginable – a nation that will rake a gravel garden into symmetrically straight lines every morning. The bullet train resolves that contradiction at 300km an hour – the fastest train in the world, built by the slowest culture in it. The fastest slow train there is.
Then there is Switzerland’s Glacier Express, which does the opposite, declaring itself the slowest fast train in the world – eight sluggish hours to cross a couple of hundred Alpine kilometres, the slowness being the entire selling point. Then the Orient Express, which should not be confused with the Glacier Express; sharing its luxury with Switzerland and which tells you everything about old Europe. Its passengers prefer the idea of travel to the actual arrival, and it is built for those who would pay extortionately to jostle through the night, dressed elegantly for a place they have no intention of reaching
And then there is the best train of all – the ghost train of Pyongyang.
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For decades it was believed that the North Korean metro was entirely fake – that it was little more than two chandeliered and marble-pillared train stations placed a hundred metres underground, populated by well-dressed “extras” who boarded one carriage, rode in a loop, and stepped off again; entirely staged for the benefit of the few foreign tourists allowed to see it. These “extras” were supposed to give the idea that the country was surviving – nay, thriving – and that people with jobs had places to be, reaching such destinations on expansive infrastructure.
North Korea’s train sits somewhere between an underground gothic ghost story and a Wes Anderson set, with its commuters who may or may not be actors; the whole transportation system whirring around in an opulent propaganda of tourist trickery. All of which makes it an underground version of The Truman Show: a fake world staged for a handful of outsiders allowed to see it. The first irony is that the Pyongyang train would be the socialist reply to a film about capitalism; and the second irony, that the film was about surveillance, a subject on which North Korea already excels.
Except that the ghost train was not fake, it was real. With 16 stations and half a million riders a day, all supported by a ticket costing half of one American cent. The train is a genuine, working and comically cheap metro. And because tourists were only permitted to visit two stops, they conspiratorially assumed the rest did not exist. The smallest fake train in the world turned out to be the deepest real one. Deep, because the metro stations double up as nuclear shelters, of course.
Which brings me to Ireland. Did you ever hear about the golf train? No? Well, it is Ireland’s answer to North Korea – which is to say it is the exact opposite of it. Pyongyang built real train stations that seemed fake. In Ireland, we are building a fake train station that will, for a brief period, seem real.
When the Ryder Cup comes to Adare Manor in 2027, roughly a quarter of a million visitors will pour into a small Limerick village whose railway station closed in 1963, a tragic casualty of the country’s decision to bet the national infrastructure on the future of cars. So today, Irish Rail is conjuring a train station back into being, by building a €3 million platform long enough for eight-carriage trains, complete with a shuttle running outside all normal timetables, bringing visitors a brisk walking distance to the gates. The construction is happening alongside works to reinstate the Limerick to Foynes freight line, which is expected to be complete in October 2026.
The Adare to Limerick Junction service will run for roughly a week, as there are, the company confirms, no plans to keep it.
But how’s this for another double dose of irony: we actually sold the old Adare station, a decade or so ago, for about €200,000. And to build the temporary one, we have just bought the same site back – for €2 million. Add on an additional €3 million more to create the stage – I mean platform – that we intend to remove again once the last four-ball has putted out.
For all the infamous stagecraft and statecraft of the North Koreans, not even they could stomach doing something so ludicrous with their trains. And unlike the North Koreans who don’t perform for visitors – especially since there are barely any – we perform only for the people who come to visit, while never for ourselves.
Is it shocking, therefore, that we discovered – the moment an external audience required it – that the train station could be reopened, the funding found, and the diggers instantly summoned – for a private event? Exactly as we discover every time a foreign dignitary lands that we have actually possessed all along the competences we forever tell ourselves that we lack. Our capability to build trains, it seems, was never missing. It was hiding and anxiously awaiting the right guests.
It is true, then, that you can tell a great deal about a country from its trains. Ours is a dizzied figment, and an interpretation of what a railway might be, executed in the established national style: inside out, upside down, and for people who do not actually live here but that we are happy to entertain.
There is a reason I have never spent time considering Irish trains, which is that until a quarter of a million strangers needed one, neither had Ireland.
