Irish Rail to seek damages from IT firm after €50m writedown on train-control project

Irish Rail has fired Spanish IT multinational Indra Sistemas from a long-delayed project designed to manage train movements across the national network and is preparing a legal case for damages.

The move follows the disclosure in May that the State-owned operator had written down €50 million of its investment in a new national train control centre in Dublin. The writedown was largely linked to the traffic management system, or TMS, being developed by Indra.

The TMS was intended to replace railway control systems regarded as virtually obsolete and integrate signals, communications and other network systems. A serious systems failure on May 29 caused significant passenger delays. The Government has earmarked almost €20 million over three years to strengthen control systems on key routes around Dublin, although enhanced arrangements are considered necessary for the planned Dart-plus expansion and new services in Cork and elsewhere.

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Indra was required to design the solution without visibility of infrastructure behaviours that materially affected system performance.

Indra said it was disappointed by Irish Rail’s decision and criticised the way the project had been managed. The company said Irish Rail relied too heavily on external advisers, mainly from abroad, while critical knowledge about the unique characteristics and limitations of the Irish network was neither fully documented nor systematically shared with the project team. It also said key Irish Rail personnel who would use the system were not actively involved until the project’s fifth year.

“Indra was required to design the solution without visibility of infrastructure behaviours that materially affected system performance,” the company told The Irish Times. It said the absence of effective sponsorship and suitably qualified internal technical leadership created a “significant governance and oversight gap.”

The project was initially expected to cost about €19 million and be operational two years ago. Irish Rail told the Oireachtas transport committee in June that it had written down €28.2 million in payments to Indra and written off more than €17 million in other project-management costs. The first phase, covering the Dublin-Rosslare line, may not be ready until next summer.

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Irish Rail did not or was unable to collaborate on the implementation of the TMS in a way that would be considered standard for operators in other countries.