IRISH RAIL DEALS with a lot of passenger journeys – about 37 million each year in fact.
And while the train is a perfectly pleasant way to commute, like all public transport, it does carry one constant threat – the fear of leaving behind your belongings.
What kind of things do people lose on the train? We wanted to find out. So we asked.
Initially, this article was supposed to deal with the items lost and found across the company’s network for a full year between June 2016 and end May 2017.
Then it became clear that the sheer gargantuan amount of consumer durables being left behind on Irish trains every day would make such a request unworkable.
So we concentrated on Connolly Station in Dublin, one of the biggest rail portals in the country, and had a look at all records for five months between 2016 and 2017. The conclusion? Pay more attention to your stuff people.
Once found, it stays
Things you may not know about lost and found on Irish Rail:
What kind of things get lost most often? Bags, hats, keys and leap cards. So, so many bunches of keys. Coming hot on those items’ heels are phones (particularly Samsung handsets – although we counted over 70 phones of different brands in total), wallets, and glasses. Lots and lots of glasses.
But leap cards (an integrated card that can be used across Irish public transport services) win out easily – over 60 of them were lost in the five-month period we looked at.
Coming up in the next tranche of often-lost miscellany: Public Services Cards (16 of them), bank and credit cards (21 of them), laptops (13), cameras (10 of them, of the high-spec Canon variety).
Irish people really don’t pay enough attention to their belongings.
“We record all our lost property at Connolly,” station manager Eddie Halpin tells TheJournal.ie. “So that’s everything from the northern line – most of it tends to come from the Drogheda-Dundalk direction (most property on the western line out of Connolly ends up in Sligo).”
Occasionally we give bags of clothes to charity or homeless services, everything else we keep, unless we can redistribute it to people who might need it.
Eddie says matter-of-factly that the station’s lost property section has “bucketloads of stuff” in it.
“Passes, cards, glasses. I’ve literally got a box of glasses here. We keep everything. Because three months later you’ll have a guy come up and tell you he lost one of his shoes on a train. So we keep it all.”
Crutches, dentures, literally everything pops up. People just don’t keep an eye on what they have.
We spoke to Eddie at 12pm on a Friday – and Connolly’s lost property had already had seven items handed in that day – a suit and shirts in a carry-case, two art books, and a couple of bunches of keys among them.
Odds and ends
Some of the odder objects we noted in the logbooks:
Lots of branded stuff shows up – generally if someone loses something important to them, they’ll make the label clear when ringing up asking about it. Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, Ted Baker. The brand that pops up most in our unscientific search is Michael Kors.
“About the only thing we move on is a passport (nine of them lost in five months, if you’re wondering),” says Eddie.
We bring them up to Store Street (Garda Station) more or less straight away. They’re just too valuable for what can be done with them, so we try to get rid of them straight away.
The oddest thing Eddie has seen in his treasure trove? “The strangest things are generally a bit rude so I couldn’t really say,” is the answer. “But we’ve seen everything at this stage you would think, nothing is a surprise any more.”
“The funny thing is people will ring up about something in a panic, and we’ll have it. And then they’ll never show up to collect it,” he says.
We’ve got absolutely loads of car keys, the electronic ones that cost a fortune to replace. No-one ever collects them. Every medication you can think of we’ll have seen at some stage.
One lady lost her ipad and called up about it, said she’d be in in a matter of days – she didn’t show up for three months.
To end on a happy note – the lost and found logbooks are scrupulously neat and well-maintained. And people who find things, even cash, generally hand them in.
“People are decent,” says Eddie. “If you’ve lost something, check with us – we’ll probably have it.”
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