The Enterprise cross-border rail service, jointly operated by Irish Rail and Translink, provides eight services per day between Dublin and Belfast, using an aging fleet of four trains. The Hub undertook a demand and revenue forecast to support the Outline Business Case (OBC) for the procurement of eight new trains, which would enable a faster hourly service between the two capital cities, informing the case for investment through the Financial and Economic cases.

• Reviewed a previous demand and revenue forecast which led to us producing a ‘red flag’ report that analysed how the methodology could be more robust.
• To address the points raised in the red flag a bespoke, PDFH-aligned demand and revenue model was created.
• Regularly discussed the assumptions and methodology with the client.
• Modelled the impact of exogenous demand drivers such as GDP, employment and population, and endogenous factors to reflect the journey time saving and improved service pattern.
• Our Key Outputs report effectively communicated visual outputs to the client to support decision making, whilst simultaneously providing detailed model outputs to inform the business case.

• Expert insight to review previous work and identify specific areas to improve the robustness of the approach.
• Commenced provisional endorsement of our approach with Ireland’s National Transport Authority (NTA) to smooth the future approval process of the OBC.
• Developed a PDFH-aligned crowding model to constrain demand across the busiest services, to simulate the impact of observed busy services in the passenger count survey data.
• Model specification and assurance provided by our demand and revenue Subject Matter Expert ensured our approach reflected industry-leading best practice.
• Distilled large quantities of base ticketing data into origin-destination flows, across a base case and sensitivity scenarios to produce a stress-tested forecast.