About Dublin Transport

Dublin Transport is an independent guide to the rail and tram network of the Dublin area, published from Bilbao by a small team that builds the same kind of guide for other cities. It is not run by, funded by or connected to Transport for Ireland, the National Transport Authority, Iarnód Éireann or Luas, and it never speaks for any of them. What it offers is their own published data, turned into one readable page for each of the seven lines and each of the 133 stops and stations, plus a map, timetables, fares, a Leap Card guide and a journey planner.

The first thing the site tries to get right is the thing visitors most often get wrong. Dublin has no metro and no underground railway. MetroLink is a project that has not been built. What the city runs is a tram with two lines, an electrified coastal railway called the DART, and four diesel commuter lines. Nothing here will call any of them a metro.

How the content is made

Almost nothing on this site is typed in by hand. The pages are generated from frozen data files, so a stop page cannot carry a time from last year because nobody rewrote its paragraph. Here is where each kind of information actually comes from.

• Which lines exist, and which stops are on them. Iarnód Éireann’s own “Dublin City and Commuter Zone Train and Tram Map”, which defines exactly seven routes — DART, South Eastern, Northern, Western, South Western, Luas Red Line, Luas Green Line — and lists every station on each. We did not invent that grouping, and we could not have derived it from the raw feed: the GTFS routes are corridors, not lines, and 15 of the 19 Irish Rail routes are labelled simply “rail”.
• Stops, coordinates and the order they run in. The NTA’s open GTFS feeds for Luas and Irish Rail, plus the Luas operator’s own stop list, which is where the Park & Ride and Cycle & Ride flags come from. The counts check out against the operators: 67 Luas stops, 32 DART stations, 133 in all.
• Irish-language names. The GTFS translations file for the tram stops and Iarnód Éireann’s Irish-language station pages for the railway stations. All 133 have one. They are shown as published and never translated by us.
• First and last departures, and how often services run. Every departure in the NTA feed for a representative week, counted per stop, per line and per direction, for five day types: Monday to Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and bank holiday. Where a day type has no departures at a stop, the page says “no service” instead of borrowing another day’s times.
• Station facilities and accessibility. Iarnód Éireann’s own station records — lifts and ramps, toilets, ticket machines, Leap validators, car parks with their space counts. Nothing is inferred. For Luas there is almost nothing to report, because luas.ie publishes no facility list for individual stops at all, and the tram pages say so rather than printing a column of blanks.
• Fares. luas.ie, transportforireland.ie, about.leapcard.ie and Iarnód Éireann’s own fares pages, each figure stored with the sentence it came from and the date it was read (2026-10-20).
• Opening dates and history. English Wikipedia, article by article, taking only what the article states. 129 of the 133 stops carry an opening date and they come at three different levels of precision — a year, a month, or a full date — which the pages print as they are. A year is never padded out into the first of January.
• What is near a stop. Named places from OpenStreetMap, read from the Irish extract, within 400 m, with the straight-line distance. Where nothing is mapped within 400 m the page widens to 1 km and says so.
• The journey planner. The same timetables, read in the browser. It is a timetable, not live running.

What we leave out on purpose

We do not write about what a station feels like, which exit is nicest or which end of the platform to stand at. We have not lived with this network day in, day out, and a guide that pretends otherwise is worth less than one that admits it.

We publish no live departures and no live disruption, because no live feed is connected. Both operators do publish one; until one is wired in, the board on the home page compares the clock with the published timetable and says only whether a line is within its service hours, in those words.

We leave out buses. Dublin Bus, Go-Ahead, Bus Éireann, Nitelink, Aircoach and Dublin Express carry far more people than the trams and trains do, and they are a different subject; where a bus is the honest answer — getting to the airport, travelling after about one in the morning — we say so and send you elsewhere. We also leave out InterCity rail beyond the commuter zone, although we do say when a station’s trains are mostly InterCity services passing through, because that changes what a ticket costs.

And where two sources disagree and neither is obviously right, we leave the detail out rather than pick one.

Known gaps and things that do not add up

Every build leaves loose ends. These are ours, as of October 2026.

• Nobody publishes the Luas fare zones. Luas prices its cash tickets by its own count of 1 to 8 zones, and neither luas.ie nor Transport for Ireland publishes a stop-by-stop zone table or a zone map — the boundaries appear only on the ticket machine screen. So we quote the two prices and never tell you which zone a stop is in.
• Most railway stations have no published fare zone either. The NTA publishes the Dublin zones as a sketch map naming a few towns. Eleven stations are named and carry a zone here; the other 55 are left blank on purpose. There is no station-to-station fare table to fall back on.
• The operator’s own route description contradicts its own feed. Iarnód Éireann’s accessible page lists nine South Eastern stops; its timetable data has Rosslare trains also calling at Grand Canal Dock, Lansdowne Road and Blackrock. We added the three, and we show no South Eastern departures at two of them, because in the representative week there are none.
• Luas Red Line trams call at Connolly in one direction only, which the same operator page describes as two routes meeting at Busáras — wrong in one direction. We followed the feed, so there is no direct tram from Connolly to The Point on this site, and the planner changes at Busáras.
• One opening date is weaker than it looks. Red Cow has no Wikipedia article of its own; the article that dates it covers the whole Red Cow Luas complex, depot and park-and-ride included. We print it as “about 2004”. Four stops — Donabate, Maynooth, Wicklow and Stillorgan — have no date anywhere and are left blank rather than estimated.
• The recommended free map has errors. The only freely licensed map of the tram network still labels Broadstone – University as “Broadstone – DIT”, a name dropped in 2024, and its line colours are not the operators’. No free map covers all seven lines at all. The diagrams on this site are generated from the timetable data instead, which is why they are right where the map is not.
• Some walking times between a Luas stop and a railway station are ours, not the operator’s. Four of the links are named by Iarnód Éireann; the rest are our estimates from the straight-line distance, and every one of them is labelled on the page where it appears.
• Neither operator publishes passenger numbers by station, so there is no “busiest station” table on this site. We would rather have the gap than a made-up ranking.
• The timetable has a shelf life. The Luas calendar in the feed we used runs to 10 December 2026. The figures on this site need rebuilding before then and again at each timetable change.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date or simply unclear, tell us and we will fix it: the contact page, or [email protected]. Corrections are made in the source data and flow through to every page that uses them, so the same mistake does not survive somewhere else on the site. We cannot help with lost property, refunds, Leap Card accounts or a complaint about a journey — those belong to the operators.

How this is paid for

Advertising, and nothing else. There is no sponsored content on this site, no paid placement, no affiliate link dressed up as a recommendation, and nobody has paid to be mentioned on a stop page. If that ever changes it will be labelled on the page where it happens. Advertising cookies are set only if you accept them; see the privacy policy and the cookie policy.

Who is behind it

Dublin Transport is published by David Franco Aguirre under GoRandom, an independent publisher of travel and public-transport guides based in Bilbao, Spain. It is written in English as it is used in Ireland, because it is written for people travelling in Dublin. We are readers of this network, not operators of it, and everything above is an attempt to be useful without overstating what we know.

Last updated: October 2026.