IRISH RAIL HAS acknowledged that it “overstretched” with its now scrapped timetable that led to overcrowding and delays.

A new service was launched on 26 August but this resulted in a large number of services being delayed and carriages being overcrowded.

But three weeks later, Irish Rail amended this timetable on the back of complaints.

The changes were made in advance of a new hourly Enterprise train service from the new Grand Central Station in Belfast.

The new €400 million Belfast transport hub officially opened on 9 September, but rail services have not yet commenced due to upgrades on the tracks.

Trains will leave Grand Central Station from Sunday and the hourly Enterprise service from Belfast is due to come into effect from 29 October.

The Enterprise is the cross-border rail service that connects Belfast and Dublin and it has been a two-hourly service since 1997.

However, the amendments last month weren’t enough to remedy the issues and Irish Rail announced last week that it would return to the timetable it was running off prior to 26 August, with some minor revisions, from Monday, 14 October.

Irish Rail today appeared before the Oireachtas Transport Committee on the impact of the new timetables.

“We are sorry this has happened, and we apologise for it, but we have acted,” Irish Rail chief executive Jim Meade told the Committee.

“With the changes from next Monday, we will begin the process of rebuilding our customers trust in the service we deliver on the affected routes,” said Meade.

He added that Irish Rail “overstretched the capacity of the system” with changes that came into place in August.

“We did try and get the half gallon into the pint glass on this stage,” he added.

Most of the complaints surrounding the timetable came from passengers on the Northern commuter route, followed by Maynooth.

“It was trying to make the whole system more efficient and add capacity and hands up, it didn’t work, we recognise that,” said Meade.

Meanwhile, Meade said that in the future, Irish Rail needs to do more to communicate timetable changes to the public.

“We did we did do the good public consultation, but I think we didn’t highlight some of the nuances of the new timetable with the traveling public.

“We’ve taken that lesson from it, that when we go into a future change, that we look at it in a bit more detail and see how we can raise people’s awareness.”

Meade added that Dublin and Belfast have been “crying out for an hourly service” and that it “should have an hourly service, just like Cork to Dublin has”.