Irish Rail is reporting an almost 4% increase in journey numbers in the first three months of the year. Over nine million passenger journeys were made by Iarnród Éireann services in the first three months of 2015.

DART journeys have seen the biggest increase of more than 6%.

Increases of 2.1% and 2.2% were also seen for Intercity and Commuter respectively.

Irish Rail says the rise is down to the success of Leap card integration, as well as economic growth and promotional activity online and for students.

The company has increased capacity on a number of services to meet the growth in demand, and has been operating additional services to supplement Intercity demand.

This includes a new Friday evening service from Dublin to Waterford.

Iarnród Éireann says it is targeting an increase in frequency of DART services in 2016, as growth is forecast to continue.

The increase in passenger numbers accelerates the trends of 2014, in which an increase of 1.1 million journeys (or 2.9%) on 2013 to 37.8 million journeys for the full year was recorded.

Spokesperson Barry Kenny told Newstalk Breakfast the company is increasing capacity on some routes as customer demand grows.