It will be all change for public transport this weekend as passengers finally get their first experience of Grand Central Station in Belfast. The last buses will leave the Europa Bus Centre on Saturday, with the first bus to depart the new station scheduled to be the 5am Sunday service to Dublin.
The project has cost an eye-watering £340 million and sits on a sprawling site on the corner of Grosvenor Road and Durham Street, and while the station may be less ‘central’ than before Translink believes it will offer passengers a more grand experience.
However, Translink also has to quickly demonstrate that Grand Central is more than simply a shinier, larger replacement for the old Great Victoria Street railway and Europa bus stations.
That will require, among other things, more frequent services, with more buses and trains. The new contactless ticketing system will have to work smoothly and reliably. And though there have been improvements, navigating Translink’s app and journey planner can still be fiendishly frustrating.
Grand Central has eight train platforms - twice as many as the old Great Victoria Street station - and 26 bus stands. All of that bus capacity will be needed from day one as, in a rather inauspicious turn of events for a train station, rail services are already running late.
The line between Lisburn and Belfast has been closed all summer and although there were strong suggestions that the necessary engineering work would have been completed by now, Translink remains vague as to when it will stop putting passengers on bus substitution services.
There are other anomalies. The Glider service which connects east and west Belfast - a route connecting the north and south of the city remains years away - does not service the new station, which is a missed opportunity.
It would also have been refreshing to see local food and drink businesses given a platform, rather than yet another Starbucks and Pret A Manger. Grand Central will have a bar which risks sending out mixed messages when drunken behaviour on buses and trains can be a problem for Translink staff and passengers.
The extent of Irish language provision remains to be seen, too.
It is inevitable that there will be teething problems with a project of this scale but overall, the new station should be an enormously positive development for Belfast and beyond.
For those who don’t already use the bus or train, Translink needs to make public transport a compelling alternative to taking the car. If it can’t achieve increased passenger numbers, it will be impossible to argue that hundreds of millions of pounds has been well spent, however grand the new station.
