Central Statistics Office

Directorate Business Statistics - Transport Section

Transport Section, Central Statistics Office, Skehard Road, Cork, Ireland

Mandatory data collection at EU level is based on legal act, the Regulation EU 2018/643 and covers goods and passengers.
Data is collected as following:

• Annex I (annual data) –goods transport ,
• Annex II (annual data)–passenger transport,
• Annex III – (quarterly data) goods and passengers,
• Annex IV and V( data every five years) regional statistics on goods and passengers and rail network and
• Annex VIII (annual data) goods and passengers transport for small undertakings.

Goods transported by rail are classified according to the 20 divisions of goods following the 'Standard Goods Classification for Transport Statistics 2007’ with effect from reference year 2008.

The codes of regions used in the region-to-region statistics are indicated in Regulation (EC) 1059/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

Railway undertakings providing transport of passengers or goods.

The main concepts used in rail domain are:

Rail passenger means any person, excluding members of the train crew, who makes a trip by rail. For accident statistics, passengers trying to embark/disembark onto/from a moving train are included.
Passenger-km means the unit of measure representing the transport of one passenger by rail over a distance of one kilometer. Only the distance on the national territory of the reporting country shall be taken into account.
Weight means the quantity of goods in tonnestones (1 000 kilograms). The weight to be taken into consideration includes, in addition to the weight of the goods transported, the weight of packaging and the tare weight of containers, swap bodies, pallets as well as road vehicles transported by rail in the course of combined transport operations. If the goods are transported using the services of more than one railway undertaking, when possible the weight of goods shall not be counted more than once.
Tonne-km means the unit of measure of goods transport which represents the transport of one tonne (1 000 kilograms) of goods by rail over a distance of one kilometer. Only the distance on the national territory of the reporting country shall be taken into account.
Train means one or more railway vehicles hauled by one or more locomotives or railcars, or one railcar travelling alone, running under a given number or specific designation from an initial fixed point to a terminal fixed point. A light engine, that is to say, a locomotive travelling on its own, is not considered to be a train.
Train-km means the unit of measure representing the movement of a train over one kilometre. The distance used is the distance actually run, if available, otherwise the standard network distance between the origin and destination shall be used. Only the distance on the national territory of the reporting country shall be taken into account.

Statistical units for rail transport statistics are all railway stations.

Data on passenger and freight transport are collected from the railway undertakings operating at national territory within thresholds mentioned in the rail regulation.
Data on traffic are collected from infrastructure managers and railway undertakings.

Operational railway network in the national terrority

Data on passengers and goods are covered from 2004 onwards.

Not applicable.

The volume and performance of rail freight traffic are measured in tonnes (mass) and tonne-kilometres. Passenger transport by rail is measured in the number of passengers and in passenger-kilometres. Information on the number of train kilometres is also available.
Traffic flows on the rail network are measured in number of trains - passenger, freight and others (optional)

The tables consist mostly of annual data. There are some tables providing quarterly and quinquennial (every five years) data.

According to the Rail regulation (EU) 2018/643 data is collected as following: Annual data
– Annex I –goods transport collected for a reference period of one year with a deadline for data transmission as 5 months after the reference periodreference period,
– Annex II –passenger transport, yearly data with eight months deadline after the end of reference period
– Annex III – quarterly data for goods and passengers with a deadline of three months after the end of the reference period,
– Annex IV and V data every five years on regional statistics on goods and passengers and rail network with deadline of 12 respectively 18 months after the end of reference period and
– Annex VIII goods and passengers transport for small undertakings with 5 respectively 8 months deadline after the end of reference period.

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1993/act/21/enacted/en/html

Regulation (EU) 2018/643 of the European Parliament and of the Council

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32018R0643&from=EN

Not applicable

National level:

The confidentiality of all information provided to the CSO by individual respondents is guaranteed by law under the 1993 Statistics Act  (information provided will be treated as strictly confidential in accordance with Section 33 of the Statistics Act 1993.

European level:

Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics (recital 24 and Article 20(4)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.

The data provided to Eurostat in the Annexes contain no confidential information.

The procedures with regard to statistical confidentiality follows the Handbook on Statistical Disclosure Control (2010) and the 1993 Statistics Act.

The data provided to Eurostat does not contain any confidential information,

We do not publish a release but we do publish Rail data in our annual Transport Omnibus - release dates can be see in the Release Calendar

https://www.cso.ie/en/csolatestnews/releasecalendar/

Data is available to all users free of charge. The Transport Omnibus is published on the CSO website.

Annual

Published annually in the Public Transport chapter of the Transport Omnibus

Published annually in the Public Transport chapter of the Transport Omnibus

Some Rail data available in the PxStat tables on the website - Rail data 

Not applicable.

Not applicable

See Rail methodology on CSO website - https://www.cso.ie/en/methods/transport/railstatistics/

See Rail methodology on CSO website - https://www.cso.ie/en/methods/transport/railstatistics/

 The system follows as far as possible the European Statistics Code of practice and Quality Assurance Framework of the European Statistical System, more precisely Principle 4: Commitment to Quality: Quality policy is defined and made available to the public. An organisational structure and tools are in place to deal with quality management. There are procedures in place to plan, monitor and improve the quality of the statistical processes.

Data quality can be assessed as high. There is a set of validation rules and quality checks put in place, which detect various types of issues. In case of any issues detected, the data provider is contacted to provide explanations or/and revise the data accordingly. Checks for the consistency over times are prepared and reviewed.
Eurostat also provide a data quality report with a summary of the main findings affecting quality as well as showing the solution adopted and the materiality of the existing differences.

The key users of rail transport statistics collected are:

Department of Transport, Eurostat, Universities and research institutions, Users involved in the transport industry and the general public.

Data on passenger numbers, passenger-km, freight carried and freight-km are published.

More recently, we include rail journeys in our Transport Bulletin currently published monthly. This has been published since the world-wide pandemic - COVID-19.

No user surveys have been carried out but given feedback from users, we are meeting data needs at present.

The collection of data on rail transport statistics is carried out in accordance with the provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/643.

Overall accuracy of the rail transport statistics data is good. The processing with checks carried out before transmitting data to Eurostat provides a high accuracy of the data. 

Not applicable for rail transport statistics data collection.

By working closely with the repondents, the various checks and the legal obligation to cooperate and report the data, misclassifications, under- or over-coverage can be excluded. Moreover, the correctness of the data is of great importance for the respondents.

All the statistics required by the provisions of the Regulation (EU) 2018/643 are transmitted to Eurostat within agreed deadlines for the different Anneses.

All the statistics required by the provisions of the Regulation (EU) 2018/643. are transmitted to Eurostat within agreed deadlines for the different Anneses.

There are no problems of comparability for rail transport data collection.

Any fluctuations in data comparability are queried and they are collected following fully the provisions of the legal act - the Regulation (EU) 2018/643. Time series checks are regularly made to detect inconsistencies in the data.

Comparisons with other transport statistics are only partially and to a limited extent possible with regard to freight transport and passenger transport, since data are currently not available or are not collected at the same level of detail and also different methods and underlying objectives.

Data collected and sent to Eurostat is consistent

The response burden is put on the respondent, but is reduced to a minimum – the data users provide the data automatically via emails. The data providers are only contacted if minor errors cannot be solved by the CSO.

Data is only revised for Annex E which is quarterly. It is rarely revised for other annexes, (unless revised data received by the CSO), as they are annual or every five years.

See 17.1

Data is collected from Irish Rail.

Data is collected quarterly for Annex E, annually for Annex A and C and every five years for Annexes F and G.

Data is collected as required for the different Annexes as per Regulation (EU) 2018/643.

Consistency checks over time are carried out and large fluctuations are queried with the respondents.

Data is compiled by the CSO as per Regulation (EU) 2018/643.

Not applicable

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