From
ITVFinal touches are being put in place at Belfast's Grand Central Station as it gears up to open to the public.
Bus services will operate from the site from Sunday 8 September, but no date has been set for the commencement of rail services at the new transport hub.
and
The first bus service to depart from the new site will travel to Dublin at 5am.
Chris Conway described the development, which is expected to cost around £340million, as "a world class facility", and "a modern station fit for a modern city".
"We want to make sure we keep safety as our number one priority," he explained.
"Buses will start phasing over from Sunday, from the Europa to Belfast Grand Central Station.
"We're working closely with the safety authority to be able to announce a date for the railway opening soon.
"We hope to have over 20m passengers through these doors on an annual basis," he added.
"To put that into context, Belfast City Airport sees maybe 2m per year, while Belfast International sees about six or 7m.
"The new station will double the capacity we have on our public transport network coming into Belfast and it will increase connectivity in Northern Ireland and right across the island of Ireland.
"The important thing is that we use it to increase capacity in our bus and rail network and get more people using public transport, and for me that will be the real test as to whether this has worked," he added.
I love the early Sunday morning start - real forward looking "Option 24/7" stuff to provide the passenger with a service at the day and time they want it, not just at a time it will make money.
Belfast is something of an outlier in terms of
UK▸ public transport.
* A through integrated
train service across the majority of the United Kingdom is not possible due to the inconvenient stretch of water in between, and so there's a natural disposition to fly shorter routes; I do wonder how many public transport passengers use the ferry from Belfast to Liverpool or Larne to Cairnryan these days.
* Northern Ireland's railways were decimated in the third quarter of the last century and what is left is a really sad remnant. Having said which, the railway building "bug" of the Victorian era had provided an extreme case of overprovision of little railways, and the Irish Civil War of the 1920s and resultant segregation has left its mark.
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