CIE's plans to bring trams back to Dublin may not involve rebuilding many of the bridges along the old Harcourt Street line. Instead, the company's light rail project team wants to demolish the Ranelagh embankment to allow the trams to run at street level.
"It's one of the things we want to talk to the public about", said Mr Mangan, who agreed it was a radical idea. "It's very hard to predict how people would react to it. But we've calculated that it would be cheaper by about a million pounds."
Demolishing the embankment, which extends from the Grand Canal almost to Cowper Road, would involve carting away millions of tonnes of earth. It would also mean demolishing several cut stone abutments which have survived as archaeological features since the line closed in 1959.
"We wouldn't necessarily be hung up on it in one way or another, but what we want to do in the next couple of months is to expose all of these ideas in the public consultation phase and let everyone have their say and then reach some sort of collective decision."
He believed it would be "much more attractive" to have the trams running at street level. Apart from making the light rail system more accessible to disabled people, it would have the bonus of "eliminating a linear barrier across a huge chunk of the city".
"After you cross the canal on a new bridge, you would come down as quickly as possible and you'd be at grade (street level) right through Ranelagh." He said the Milltown Viaduct would be retained and there would be a new bridge over Taney Road in Dundrum.
