Today, Metrolinx released its long-awaited study of GO Transit electrification. I will comment on this in more detail over the next day or so, but here are preliminary observations while the news is fresh.
Updated 4:30 pm: The study appendices are now available online. I have not incorporated any information from them in the article below.
The study finds that electrification is a worthwhile venture on selected, well-used corridors, and that it is an important foundation for the growth of GO Transit into its regional role proposed in Metrolinx’ Big Move.
The proposed staging of the electrification project (all times are estimates) is:
- Preliminary design and Environmental Assessments (3-4 yrs)
- Union to Pearson Airport, and Union to Mimico (Willowbrook Shops) (4-5 years)
- Pearson Airport spur to Brampton (Mt. Pleasant) (2 years)
- Union to Oshawa (including access to a new eastern maintenance shops) (4 years)
- Mimico to Oakville (2 years)
- Oakville to Hamilton (James Street Station) (2 years)
- Oshawa to Bowmanville (2 years)
- Brampton to Kitchener (2-3 years)
Other corridors were studied, but the best benefit-cost ratio was found to be the combination of Georgetown and Lake Shore. Events over the next decades may prove this to be short-sighted, but that’s today’s plan.
The implementation is rather leisurely, and if all of its phases take place sequentially, it will be the early 2030s before this scheme is completed. The Environmental Assessments will use the expedited process most recently seen on the Transit City projects. This will avoid the need for “alternatives analysis” on projects where the alignment and technology selections are a foregone conclusion, and the “terms of reference” will be much simpler than a full EA.
No individual benefit is cited for electrification, but rather the combined effect of contributions to travel time savings, operating costs, reliability, environmental concerns and long-term capacity of the GO system.
On the environmental front, the study finds that the benefits of electrification relative to Tier 4 diesel technology (which GO will be using in the 2015 timeframe) are small, especially when this is considered in a regional context. Local effects are within the World Health Organization standards. (The study appendices with details of these claims are not yet online as I write this.)
Metrolinx proposes that the initial implementation be with electric locomotives pulling the existing bilevel coaches in 10-car consists. This approach minimizes the spending, short term, on new equipment.
The phased rollout will create a few obvious operational and planning issues for GO Transit:
- Lines that now operate as a single service will have to be split (notably the Lake Shore corridor) unless electrification waits until the last kilometre of track is under wire. This would defeat the purpose of phased construction.
- The advantages of electrification will not reach the full network for an extended period, likely well beyond the point where demand and service design would benefit from the changeover.
- By the time parts of the network are completed, the existing fleet will be closer to retirement, or could be absorbed in service improvements on lines that will remain as diesel. The cost justification for locomotive/coach consists may not exist if equipment has to be purchased new, especially as this would lock in the comparative inefficiency relative to electric MU (EMU) coaches for several decades.
Indeed, other than as a means to stretch out the capital spending, it is hard to believe that it would take over 20 years to build a 235km electrification.
In the medium term, with locomotives hauling bilevel coaches, the time savings for riders would be modest with the greatest saving for the longest trips. However, those would not actually be electrified until the late 2020s or worse. The real benefit comes with a move to EMUs with much better acceleration and deceleration, and much higher travel time savings even on comparatively short trips.
The estimated cost of electrification, including rolling stock (locomotives) lies in a range from $1.6-1.8-billion.
An important premise of the study is the “reference case” including those service and infrastructure improvements that would occur even without electrification. These are listed on the last page of the Board Report to be discussed on January 26, and they total about $2.52b. Some of this work already has committed funding, but not all of it.
These costs need to be put in context: the total for service improvements, new infrastructure and electrification is in the $4-4.5b range, and this compares favourably with various transit projects in Toronto.
Particularly striking here is the about-face in Metrolinx’ position regarding electrification. Quite recently, we were told that this was simply not a financially viable option.
But even if the study currently underway to assess the cost of electrifying the GO system — which could come in anywhere from $4 to $7 billion — recommends the move, it won’t happen immediately, [Robert Prichard] said. [Toronto Star website, May 21, 2010, scroll down to “Clean Train Coalition”]
The air-rail corridor is being built in such a way that it could be converted to electric trains in the future, something that could cost up to $1 billion, said Prichard. [Toronto Star, July 31, 2010 quoting the Chair of Metrolinx]
The full network option’s cost is now estimated at about $4b, but this scope of work has never been seriously considered. Seven billion, however, was convenient large enough to frighten politicians and limit the credibility of electrification advocates.
The cost for the Air Rail Corridor, including a link to the maintenance yard at Willowbrook, is now estimated at $457m including the design, EA, and construction. The full “Option 3” of Georgetown, ARL and Lake Shore is under $2b for the most heavily-used parts of the network.
Now, Metrolinx has discovered not only that electrification is cheaper than previously claimed, but that it is essential to the future expansion of service and capacity. Whether Metrolinx (and more importantly GO) has actually embraced this concept, or will mutter disparagingly to anyone who will listen, remains to be seen. I cannot help noticing an analogy to the TTC where, for a time, LRT was embraced as a viable technology, only to be eclipsed when its political sponsor left office. Will electrification suffer a similar fate if the Liberals are defeated in fall 2011?
All of this is moot if there is no funding. Metrolinx will not deliver its “Investment Strategy” until sometime in 2013, or maybe late 2012. Where will we get the revenue (and the political will to levy needed taxes, tolls or fees) to underwrite this and other major regional transit projects?
The release of the Metrolinx electrification study is an important step forward in transportation planning for the GTA. Now there is a consistent, credible source of information about the options for and benefits of electrification rather than a mixed bag of old studies and off-the-cuff estimates. Metrolinx has produced an integrated piece of planning, a network-wide view that, even though we may disagree on details, at least studies and proposes options for their system effects, not for the short-term political benefit of one riding or politician.
I will return to the details of this study in a future article.
Steve Munro 
I’ve read through the study, and I was struck by the assertion that EMUs cost 40% more than Electric locos. Reading on further, they are comparing the cost of lcoo+10 carriages with a 12-car EMU, because “EMUs have lower capacity”. I find it hard to believe that a modern EMU really has a capacity so much lower than a carriage using the same shell. Maybe a few seats, but not one sixth! I also find it odd that the life-cycle costs of EMUs are 2.5 times that of locos + carriages.
I suspect that the lack of commercially avilable FRA-compliant double-decker EMUs may have led to some over-cautious cost estimates
That aside, this does seem to be a methodical study which has tried to get all the costs nailed down in as much detail as possible. For example, they went to the effort of doing proper modelling of the electricity requirements. (In the UK a few years ago, the rollout of a new train fleet in the southeast was delayed after they realised the railway’s power supply needed upgrading by a *lot*).
What I would like to have seen would be thresholds at which the recommended corridors change. For example, the Barrie line presumably didn’t have enough passengers to justify electrification… how many would it need? A bit more or a lot more? The study mentioned that the RH corridor doesn’t benefit from electric trains because of speed restrictions… what if these were removed? Or, coming back to my earlier point, how much cheaper would EMUs have to be for them to beat loco+carriages, bearing in mind the journey time savings with EMUs are substantial.
I agree that the timeline seems very relaxed, but it would limit expenditure to about $100m/year – it looks like DMUs for the ARL on opening day. The electrification comes in at around $6m/km, which is pretty good.
Steve: It’s worth noting that “The Big Move” includes frequent service on some of the corridors not flagged for electrification. The problem here is that the operational model for GO’s reference case is not the same as the long-range view in “TBM”, and as a result, lower train counts and passenger volumes are used in this study. At least, however, all corridors have been evaluated, and if circumstances change, the dog-work of producing at least a preliminary estimate will already be “on file”.
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The problem with the study, and with having 12-car-long EMU is that it ignores one obvious fact:
the speed benefits of EMU mean that the trains don’t need to have the same capacity. The additional speed means they can send the same trainset into and out of union more times in a single day.
EMU can provide higher total capacity over the course of the day, even if the trains are lower capacity than our current trains are.
It’s not incidental that very few regional rail services being built these days use locomotives. Anywhere outside of North America, the very thought of locomotive-hauled regional trains would be laughed at.
Steve: It is important to distinguish between speed and capacity. Provided that there is no lower limit on headway, your argument holds true — smaller trains running more frequently can provide the same capacity. However, there is a constraint at Union (mainly) on the number of trains per hour regardless of their length. Once you hit this limit, then train capacity is important, subject to whatever limits might exist on train length and platform capacity.
GO is trying to maximise the useful life in the locomotive and coach fleet, but they seem to have made that decision before proposing such an extended build-out of electric operation. The existing loco-hauled trains can shift over to other diesel-operated lines as service on them builds up, and new EMU sets could be bought for the electric routes. This part of the study appears to have been pulled together at the last minute based on the proposal as it existed at the last public workshop.
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The accelerated EA that was used to bulldoze over the community will now be turned around to expedite the EA on electrification. Delightful.
The study greatly plays down the environmental differences between diesel and electric by not including the total carbon footprint for each system. There is more than just emissions to consider. This strikes me as a bit of ass covering for tier 4 which Mx basically has already decided on.
Frankly, given that most of the Pan Am people will be driving on dedicated bus lines instead of the ARL, that 2015 deadline is meaningless and they could just move towards electrification right now.
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“I suspect that the lack of commercially avilable FRA-compliant double-decker EMUs may have led to some over-cautious cost estimates”
Don’t know what FRA is, but if it helps, CityRail in Sydney operates double deck EMUs if I recall correctly http://www.cityrail.info/about/fleet/
The only drawback is they really need three doors per carriage, rather than two, to make dwell times at stations shorter.
Steve: “FRA” is the Federal Railroad Administration in the USA, and they set standards observed across North America for collision strength in trains. Because GO service interoperates with freight traffic and with standard passenger trains, it must meet the crashworthiness standards for main line rail equipment. This is a big problem with equipment operated in Europe and proposed for here by some advocates — European standards are lower than those in the USA. The only option is temporal segregation between operations, and this is not practical on all corridors. The railways and the regulatory authorities are extremely unlikely to agree to any relaxation of the standards, and if that is a precondition for a new type of equipment running on GO Transit, we will wait a very long time for that first train.
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This seems biased against EMUs. Consider the case of Montreal’s Deux Montagnes line, where electrification and using emu’s reduced the travel time from like 55 to like 35 minutes. This means travel time reduction by 40% – this means you need 40% fewer trains to offer the same number of rides a day – which means that even if they are 40% more expensive, it comes down to the same thing. At the same time you can crank up the speed and offer frequent all day service, which should be operationally cheaper, which should induce much more demand.
One can also add more infill stations (especially in downtown), which should spread the passengers through downtown, rather than forcing everybody through union station, which could also make the train more attractive for more people, not just the crowd going from suburban station to Union.
And with high frequency service in downtown, the commuter rail can become like a surface metro – this is how RERs and S-Bahns do it. Just electrifying without using EMUs or changing how one operates is not going to be very useful.
Regarding FRA-compliance — I hear the rules are more relaxed if ctc is used, or if the network operates on its own track. One could probably get the rules a bit more relaxed to be able to get those cheap/light European EMUs.
Has anybody considered working together with the AMT (Montreal) on this one? They will have electrification coming up soon, too. It might be cheaper to procure rolling stock together (like when the AMT and NJTransit got those dual mode locomotives from Bombardier), it might be easier to get the regulations changed, and it’s good to have a common standard, hopefully one that already exists somewhere.
Steve: I agree that the study is biased against EMUs and seems bent on keeping locomotive hauled trains in service for as long as possible even though Metrolinx now acknowledges that there are major advantages to EMU operation. I suspect they have come to that conclusion quite recently, and the study’s underlying philosophy has not been updated to reflect this. Also, it is quite likely that the bias originates in GO Transit whose merger into Metrolinx is still a work in progress.
As for temporal segregation, this is possible only on tracks that GO owns and where there would be little or no freight traffic. That is not the situation on all of the lines, and non FRA-compliant gear would be constrained in where it could operate. The outer parts of the Lake Shore corridor, for example, are the CNR main line, and already have problems with freight traffic interfering with GO operations.
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Congratulations to the Weston community who finally have a commitment to electrification of this corridor! Of all the transit infrastructure projects I’ve heard about over the last year the Weston folks had the worst of it, and I’m very pleased for them that there is some progress in their favour.
I have to say that, considering all the struggle by that community, today’s announcement sounded like a bit of a slap in the face to them. I didn’t catch who exactly was being quoted on the radio, but they seemed to make a point to say that this *wasn’t* being done for environmental or community impact reasons. I found myself wondering just why on earth the decision would have been announced that way. I would have expected them to say something along the lines of: “the new financial figures COMBINED with the interests of the community COMBINED with improved transit times, etc… prompted us to change our earlier decision.”
Part of the message I got from the original decision was that Metrolinx could care less about the impacts of their infrastructure projects on local communities (sounds oddly similar to the TTC…). Today’s announcement just reinforced that message, but oddly went further – it seemed to needlessly go out of its way to let us know that the communities interests were of so little regard that they didn’t factor even the slightest into the new decision. Seems a very odd (in a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot kind of way) thing to say in an election year, considering the precarious position of the Liberal government who is providing funding for these projects (and this board).
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Well, maybe it’s possible to do temporal segregation of freight trains and light weight emus. FRA-compliant, locomotive hauled, diesel or dual mode service could operate on the outer edges of the system in shared freight traffic, and in the downtown corridors with shared light weight emu traffic, if they have ctc.
Steve: The entire network has CTC already — this is a red herring. The basic issue is that GO has or plans to have frequent all day service in areas where CNR has all day freight traffic. These are busy corridors, not quiet branch lines with one or two freight moves per day that can be shuffled off to non-passenger hours.
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Munich is getting 30 tph on their 2-track trunk line. The trains are EMU’s, and ctc is used (on the trunk line only). Additionally they spread passengers across 5 stations, and two stations actually use platforms on both sides, to move a total of 800.000 passengers a day.
Isn’t the trunk line around Union station 4-tracked? Maybe it would make sense to separate the operations into locomotive/Diesel hauled regional operations on the one hand, and a emu-run surface metro on the other.
Steve: It’s not that simple. The lines to be electrified, the ones that will have very frequent service, are “regional” and will account for the majority of GO’s total train count. As for additional stations, where would you put them? Cities with a long history of passenger rail service have evolved a network with multiple major nodes, but this is not something one can retrofit to a developed city like Toronto. Even our unused station at North Toronto is not well-situated — there is little office space in walking distance, and transferring passengers onto the subway at its peak point isn’t at all useful.
Metrolinx has been looking at Union Station capacity issues, and one approach they have thought of is offloading the GO network onto “surplus capacity” on the subway system. There may be a “surplus” at places like Kipling, but not downtown where the passengers are headed.
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In appendix 8C page 6-8 the study describes its assumptions with respect to the cost of diesel fuel and electricity.
It seems to suggest that they have fixed the energy costs at current prices over the study timeframe. Doesn’t the Province already have a statutory commitment to raising electricity costs in real terms over the near and medium term ?
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You stated
“The implementation is rather leisurely, and if all of its phases take place sequentially, it will be the early 2030s before this scheme is completed.”
I hope that they don’t do this needed change sequentially, a lot of these projects could happen at the very same time and their would be no conflict other then funding. Also you stated in your timelines that the electrification
“Oakville to Hamilton (James Street Station) (2 years)”.
I hope that two years includes expanding the James St. Station so that it will have more tracks and the upgraded station could have all day two-way service instead of the present set-up.
Steve: Upgrades to existing facilities including James St. Station are separate from and long before the electrification. They have to reactivate this station for the St. Catharines service.
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It did seem to me when the comparison EMU in a prior document was a European set normally sold in 3-4 car trains (so 6/8 cabs over the length of the set) that EMUs were being set up to fail. To be fair though, AMT went with dualmode loco and multilevels rather than EMUs when expanding their electric network. Perhaps if they had been working with Metrolinx rather than NJTransit it might have gone differently.
Also, it is only in GO Transit’s monolithic thinking that we couldn’t have a mixed fleet (you know that there are nervous twitches going like crazy all over that office now that they are back in the single deck business with ARL and not their precious loco+lozenge – and having spent a whack of money on 12 car platforms we’re going back to (E)loco+10??)
Yes, EMUs are a big upfront cost compared to changing out a loco, but expansion to Kitchener and so on will require additional diesel/unpowered stock and there’s also the option of shopping existing rolling stock to other networks, just as GO’s former F59PH locomotives are earning their keep in Quebec, Texas and Virginia.
Also – if electrification was started from the east (i.e. build Whitby yard first wired for electric) then ARL trains would not have to reverse on their way to/from Willowbrook and the new yard could be commissioned and capacity shifted across to Whitby while minimising disruption occasioned by rebuilding Willowbrook – not to mention hastening the added resilence of the network against derailments etc.
There would also be the potential for Brampton-Whitby GO trains by having Georgetown trains run through and running Lakeshore West trains semi-express to help them keep up/manage capacity on Lakeshore East.
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ant6n says: “Munich is getting 30 tph on their 2-track trunk line”
The limiting factor is *not* the capacity of the lines around Union – its Union itself. If you look at the time take from one train arriving to the next arriving in the same platform, and the number of platforms available to GO, you end up with a number a lot lower than four tracks and 5-min headways allows.
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Steve: “European standards are lower than those in the USA.”
No they are not…. *sigh*… this seems to be a common misconception in North America.
European standards are based around the rolling stock meeting certain tests – for example, withstanding a frontal impact of a certain force. FRA standards are based around certain construction specifications, mostly set back in the 1950s (with some updates through the years).
The result is that European trains have got lighter as construction methods and materials have improved over the decades, while meeting ever-more stringent crash tests (similar to automobiles, actually). If you were to take an FRA-compliant train, it would almost certainly fail those tests. What matters is not how they are built, but what happens in a crash, which is why European trains are safer.
This is all slightly moot: Canada, for better or worse, uses FRA standards.
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At the Metrolinx media briefing, which your website host attended, I made the comment that we’ve probably gotten the Province about 10% pregnant on electrification. That’s a major accomplishment and my colleagues in the Clean Train Coalition deserve a lot of credit for their role in getting us to this stage.
Like Steve, I worry that this report will wind up being just like all the previous ones and gather dust on our bookshelves. Metrolinx’s study is flawed in so many respects. We flagged many of these flaws in fact and logic at the stakeholder sessions, but they weren’t addressed.
The issue of non-FRA compliant EMUs is a big one. Those interested in it should visit the Caltrain website. Caltrain has been for many years working towards the electrification of its San Francisco-San Jose Peninsula Commute line. They assessed all the equipment options and chose non-FRA compliant European bilevel EMUs. They’ve even received a tentative waiver from the FRA to operate this advanced and cost-effective equipment. Their plan involves not just electrification and new rolling stock, but the application of positive train control on the line, which will be shared with the San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco-Sacramento high-speed passenger trains. These, too, will be built to non-FRA European standards.
I could go on and on here about this study. I shall be reviewing it in my forthcoming report for the Clean Train Coalition and Transport Action, which should be available next week and which I will send on to Steve for posting. Meanwhile, his analysis is eagerly anticipated (although probably not by our colleagues at 20 Bay Street).
All of us who advocate ARL and GO electrification need to be vigilant. We need to keep the Province’s feet to the fire or else it won’t get done and more years will be wasted. That would be yet another transit tragedy for Toronto and all of southern Ontario.
Steve: My only reply to Greg’s comment at this point echoes something he has said — the mainline railways, over whose track GO runs, are the ones who have to accept non-FRA trains. If they oppose such equipment to the federal regulators, do you really expect them to be overruled?
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Steve said: The railways and the regulatory authorities are extremely unlikely to agree to any relaxation of the standards, and if that is a precondition for a new type of equipment running on GO Transit, we will wait a very long time for that first train.
That’s not entirely true. The FRA has already agreed to a demonstration of mixed use of EMU’s on Caltrain, and in the US things do seem headed toward new standards between growing demand for self propelled vehicles and the push for high speed rail. This is obviously all contingent on some sort of PTC implementation, but the mandate for full implementation across at least the American network is still in place. There really are signs that this might be the proper time to start pushing for modernized regulations; everyone really does need to keep in mind that this is really not a safety issue, the current regulations were designed long before modern materials, designs or simulation became available. The Caltrain study in fact indicated that European standards provided higher levels of protection than FRA equipment in the most common types of accidents, especially at grade crossings.
Steve: While this is possible, I also look at a demand by folks like the Clean Train Coalition for electrification yesterday. We are not going to see movement on the Canadian regulatory framework quickly enough to affect any work designed and built in the next few years, if only because Canadian agencies will want to see how the American projects work before changing the regs here. The distinction is between what makes sense, and what is likely, let alone possible.
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“As for additional stations, where would you put them?”
In Munich, the 6 downtown stations are in a 4km corridor, and it was retrofit in the 70ies. It should be possible to ‘retrofit’ new nodes in downtown Toronto – they would have to be between surface rail and streetcars. Candidates would be
-Spadina
-Bathurst
-King
-Queen (E/W)
-Dundas
-maybe Parliament
This could provide one-transfer access from the GO trains to the whole downtown area.
These S-Bahn/RER type systems work very well over in Europe, moving several times the people that the traditional commuter rail systems do in North America. And most of them were ‘retrofit’ (Berlin and Hamburg in the 20s/30s, Paris in the 60s/70s, Munich and Frankfurt in the 70s, Zurich in the 80s).
Electrification represents the chance to replicate some of this success here. Sure that isn’t easy, but so far the plans are a bit underwhelming, and seem to ignore the possibilities.
Steve: The locations you point to are not on the same line. King, Queen and Dundas have a north-south orientation, while Bathurst, Spadina, and Parliament are along an east-west path. Essentially you are talking about a “GO subway” which is one of the options being considered as a capacity relief to Union Station. Metrolinx recognizes that electrification is a pre-requisite to such an operation. Also, it is important to consider the functions the stations you propose would have. Many of them would be distant from major employment centres at least in the medium term, and a lot would depend on where the corridor with these stations was actually located. I get the impression from several of your comments that you are not all that familiar with central Toronto.
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FRA-compliant EMUs are common in several US states. I have travelled on double-deck EMUs in Chicago (Metra Electric) and Baltimore-Washington (MARC). The Metro-North New Haven Line, SEPTA (Philadelphia) and the South Shore Line (Chicago-Gary-South Bend) also use single-deck EMUs. New Jersey Transit uses a mix of double deck EMUs, electric locomotive-powered trains, (soon to arrive dual mode) and all-diesel trains.
Though for express trains on the Lakeshore (and perhaps Georgetown) service, electric locomotive-powered trains would be fine, as they would not have as much time wasted in acceleration and deceleration that give EMUs their greatest advantage.
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20 year build-out? Seems absurdly slow. About Pennsylvania RR’s approx 235 mile electrification from Philly to DC and Philly to Harrisburg in the 1930s, from the evil Wikipedia:
Steve: Ah yes, but we all know that when governments really want things to happen, they happen. When they want to foot drag, consultants make a lot of money, but with little to show for it.
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Are the trains through routed, or are they terminated and then turned around at Union?
Steve: That depends on what state of the electrification in progress you are talking about. At the media briefing, Metrolinx acknowledged that there would be periods when existing through services would have to be split because of incomplete electrification of the corridor. Also, at future service levels, through-routing of trains will depend on the headways and demands then in effect on various routes out of Union Station. You cannot use today’s operation as a definitive model.
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Now we know that electrification’s recommended but the big question is whether there’ll be any follow through to make it happen, and the record in Toronto and Ontario for that is awful. Either nothing happens, or it’s not complete, or it’s a basket case of misapplied technology.
Is it possible for the Ontario government to actually follow through and build one transit project, get it in service and have it work properly?
Steve: Let me get back to you on that. I need a few polls and a study.
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Actually the Newmarket and Uxbridge Subs run under train order and not ctc if I recall correctly. However the main parts of the network Lakeshore East, Lakeshore West, Georgetown and Milton are ctc.
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Why is there no thought being given to scrapping any enlargement of Union, dedicating Union to Lake Shore traffic, and creating northern hubs @ Eglinton diverting n/s traffic into n/s/e/w traffic at those points and dumping the exTO traffic onto the greatly improved subway system – the legacy of Mr Ford!
The Dundas corridor, and the Newmarket corridor could be handed on to the Transit City local network. [tongue only slightly in cheek.]
Steve: When I consider that all of the proposed service increases and the electrification on Lake Shore and Georgetown can be built for only slightly more than the current estimated cost of the subway from Finch Station to Richmond Hill, I think it’s easy to see where the best payback is both operationally and politically.
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It is interesting ot see the problem with emu’s is their extra operating and capital costs. It would have been beneficial if the consultant had provided a table that compared the number of train sets that would be required for electric locomotive hauled consists versus emu’s. The main cost increase with maintenance is caused by the 92 day inspection required of all locomotives. A locomotive is anything with motors or brake controllers so the cab cars are locomotives in the FRA (TC)’s eyes. I would also like to know about their motor trailer sets that they appear to be using for emu’s, 6 powered cars and 6 unpowered. Are these two car sets with a cab on the motor and the trailer? If they are then each requires a 92 day inspection.
I would like to see a total cost comparison between emu’s and electric hauled coaches that showed the breakdown for all costs and the options for which they are being studied. The cost of electric locomotives are significantly higher than for diesel electrics but the life span is also probably higher. Cab cars weigh a couple of tonnes more than a regular coach because of the collision post that must be added along with the control equipment. If each car has a cab at one end then this is a waste of money. It would be more reasonable to put them into 3 car or 4 car units with only two cabs and save weight and maintenance costs. This study is next to useless as it does not give the raw data and the parameters that were being study. It is useless to say a 10 car trains with an electric locomotive was compared to a 12 car emu train. We need ALL the details: equipment cost, number of train sets, operating costs, maintenance costs, capital costs. We need all the facts and not a report that has been massaged to give the desired results.
Steve: I have not yet waded through the appendices and cannot comment on what info might be there.
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The two obvious locations for infill GO stations are just west of Spadina Ave and just east of Cherry St where train yards currently used for daytime storage of GO trains are located. With the move to more frequent all-day service this function will no longer be needed, and there is room in both of these locations to build large stations with a number of platforms.
Since the biggest limitation to Union Station capacity is passenger circulation (narrow platforms and the small size of the GO concourse, the latter of which will be improved by the ongoing renovations), rather than track capacity, I think that the addition of these two new stations should spread out passenger loads enough to allow more trains to pass through Union Station.
The only other solution is to build a new east-west tunnel for GO trains through downtown Toronto with multiple intermediate stops, as a replacement for the Downtown Relief Line. It would be interesting to compare this to TTC subway DRL proposals (the length of the tunnel would be shorter but the cost per km would be longer due to the larger loading gauge and larger platform length). Given the very high cost of any such proposal the usage of the existing rail corridor needs to be maximized first.
Steve: This sort of thing has been considered, but the big problem is getting passengers to and from the business district which is, after all, their destination.
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Believe me, Robert, this came up at the stakeholder workshops, and there was wrangling, but to no avail. The wrangling descended into the stakeholders (mainly myself and Steve) giving the lead consultant a crash course on how round-trip time savings relate to fleet planning.
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However, Richmond Hill Go line currently has only one track for the most of its length. Upgrading that line to the needed capacity might be harder and more expensive than electrifying Lakeshore or Georgetown.
Plus, the subway extension from Finch to Steeles is desirable even with upgraded Richmond Hill Go line in place. The amount of buses on Yonge between Finch and Steeles is insane, and even if the flow of VIVA buses is reduced somewhat due to Richmond Hill GO, it won’t fully solve the problem.
Steve: What is really odd is that when The Big Move was published, the Richmond Hill line was flagged as a corridor for very frequent, high capacity service carrying well over 10K riders per hour. Now, because it suits them, Metrolinx downplays the importance of this route. If Richmond Hill is such a poor route, why is it a “Regional Rail” service in their 15-year plan, and an “Express Rail” service (the sort of thing electrification is required for) in their 25-year plan? They are making up their plans as they go along.
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So in 20 years, I will be able to take the train from Hamilton to Toronto 7 minutes faster? That’s it? I’ve just lost hope of having decent public transit in my lifetime.
Steve: This is called inspired leadership in some circles.
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Lots of good input by the public here, the only one who don’t come up with good ideas is Metrolinx.
Remember the light single decker GO trains? How did they pass FRA standards? They are still in use in Montreal and on the Northlander. Those short single decker trains were fast and light, easily able to recover time on the Lakeshore hourly run. Recently the schedules have been extended by 5 mins in each direction between Oakville and Pickering because of the new locomotives and longer trains. So now they say we’ll get 2 1/2 mins back if we electrify.
I am generally for electrification, but if Toronto/Ontario cannot afford it , then we don’t really need it. Running shorter diesel trains every 20 mins is not unheard of in other parts of the world. Waiting for electrification should not be the reason for delaying better GO train service.
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Why didn’t Metrolinx think of 3rd rail technology for the electrification of the GO lines. Did the study even look at that option. We could have a system similar to what we see in the Bay Area with (BART) If they’re going to make the corridor 100 percent grade separated they might as well look at the feasibility of that option.
Steve: Yes, they did look at that as one of the power options. However, given the lay of the land of much of the trackage — existing railways, grade crossings, shared operating with freight services — third rail was rejected. There are also issues for long distance routes with the power supply because high voltages cannot be used on third rail systems. BART had the advantage of starting from scratch and building what was, in effect, a regional subway system.
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To clarify Robert Wightman’s comment: the Newmarket and Uxbridge Subs run under OCS (Occupancy Control System) rules, which is basically like train orders.
Oddly, I suspect that non-FRA-compliant equipment would be perfectly acceptable on OCS territory and NOT on CTC territory because the nature of OCS only allows one train at a time into a section of the line.
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Using current prices for the comparison is not as wrong as one may first suspect. Naturally, if you were forecasting how the costs to run the current system would be over the next decade, then using only today’s energy costs is false.
However, the study is comparing two energy sources and it is not a far fetched assumption to just use today’s prices simply because it is not a wild idea that both will rise in price in a similar way. I’m not saying that diesel fuel and electricity will both go up exactly equally in price, but I suspect it is safe to say that one won’t be rising with inflation while the other skyrockets. If one can be shown to be less costly than the other using today’s prices, the same conclusion will occur unless there is some drastic separations where each is heading. Is there someone out there who thinks diesel will plummet while electricity prices quadurple?!?
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I’m afraid that in the Big Move context, Richmond Hill GO projections were just made up. Metrolinx was eager to build Yonge Subway Extension before DRL (the former is in the 15-year plan whereas DRL is in 25-year plan).
Metrolinx did not want to replace Yonge North Subway with upgraded RH GO. On the contrary, they wanted to build both of them, and use RH GO to shuttle downtown-bound riders from Richmond Hill and prevent overflow of Yonge subway further south.
That reliance on Richmond Hill GO was suspicious from the onset, as noone explained how it will be double-tracked given the corridor width issues, and how competitive the trip time will be (compared to Yonge subway) given that the RH GO line is very indirect and has many curves.
As well, noone explained why Richmond Hill Centre needs both the subway and the upgraded GO line before many other nodes in GTA get their first rapid transit link.
Steve: Are you implying that Metrolinx cooked The Big Move? Oh, for shame! And I thought they were all such professional, honourable men. My faith is deeply shaken.
Of course the other possibility is that the folks who made that plan didn’t know what they were doing (there is lots of evidence for that too).
I am sure that the new private sector board will bring their vast expertise to bear on this problem.
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In the context of this study, I think the relevance of Richmond Hill was severely diminished by the issue of additional stations falling off the radar (I remember clearly this being considered fair game earlier in the process), and this is very unfortunate given the relationships that must exist to one extent or another between the Yonge and Richmond Hill lines. The Richmond Hill corridor requires not only additional stations (and track), but also utilization of the Don Branch to eliminate a good chunk of the curves that the final report noted keeps speeds low (it should be noted this does require some new track in the Wynford area, which has previously been studied and is feasible). There aren’t many places to stop in the Don Valley south of Eglinton, so straight track really makes a difference for travel times along this stretch of corridor.
We know that Lawrence E, York Mills, Finch E, and Steeles E are busy bus routes, and, fare integration issues notwithstanding, there is potential for intercepting some of Yonge’s demand with more stations along a rerouted Richmond Hill corridor. The same principle applies in York Region, although bus services there aren’t as busy as Toronto’s (a result from a combination of fare differences and built form differences). Richmond Hill GO needs a lot of work, make no mistake, but the cost is only 10-20% of what a Yonge line extension would cost, and if done right has rich potential to serve as a “DRL North” of sorts, a concept that should be in line with the objectives The Big Move, but is not practical as a LHC operation.
Regrettably, because the Reference Case was not open for debate and set in stone before the study began (despite the game-changing nature that electrification represents that should make such a move counterintuitive), the focus in the electrification study with regard to Richmond Hill GO is on an extension to a new greenfield parking lot and bus terminal serving buses coming down the 404 at Bloomington Rd.
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With peak oil and/or global warming, I think it is likely that diesel will quadruple over the next ten years while electricity prices would remain stable.
That makes the slow rollout of electrification look ridicules.
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Service is more expensive to provide with diesel than electric. Higher fuel costs, more mechanical moving parts, higher weights which require more energy to move (on board power plants (and fuel tanks!) are really heavy), and more staff/fleet required from slower operating speeds. Electrification is important to the financial sustainability of GO operations in the future as its demands grow. Just ask Caltrain the San Fran-San Jose area, which has realized that they will go bankrupt if they don’t electrify because the service levels they need to ramp up to cannot be efficiently provided with diesel.
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Steve: I am not implying that all of Big Move, or most of it, was cooked. I believe that most of the stuff presented there is reasonable. But the handling of Richmond Hill GO looks a little fishy.
Of course, it is hard to get a large transit study done in a completely unbiased manner, whether the board conducting it is public, private, governmental, arms-length or whatever. Given that many input parameters are judgement-based rather than mathematically determined, it is just too tempting to skew the inputs to get the desirable outcome.
Karl: the idea to use RH GO line as DRL North with stops at all major streets is certainly interesting, but is it actually possible to dual-track the whole line? Or, to operate frequent service with some single-track segments remaining?
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Metrolinx’s plan is not better rail service. That has been shown over and over by the readers here.
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I have read 4 of the appendices and can find no mention of the number of EMU’s required except for the ARL. The other factor that they seem to always ignore is the use of AC motored diesel locomotives. AC propulsion would improve the tractive effort by at least 33% and as much as 60%, depending on whose coefficients of friction you use over DC traction motored diesel locomotives. If GO were to use 2 AC motored diesel locomotives, one at each end, they could achieve all of the time savings of Electric Locomotives at a fraction of the capital costs, but GO has made up its mind and does not want to be confused by facts. They are ignoring the two options that give the best running times, EMU, or the best cost return with smaller running time improvement, AC motored diesel locomotives.
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The CN Bala right-of-way that RH GO operates on is consistently 30m wide between Steeles and Lawrence. Except for the part east of Don Mills Rd, the terrain doesn’t appear to be particularly challenging as far as I can see, except for some single-track bridges over the Don River, of which there’s a small handful. Between Lawrence and the CPR Belleville line, I assume new tracks between Bala and Belleville similar (but not identical, as the requirements have changed) to what was studied in 2005 would be built as part of a broader and more ambitious service improvement project. This avoids the more challenging areas of the CN Bala right-of-way.
CPR Belleville isn’t as wide, its right-of-way is around 22-24m, although it opens up dramatically south of Wicksteed. The CPR Don Branch is also quite wide north of the Brick Works, but is unbelievably pinched between the Prince Edward Viaduct and the Bayview/Bloor DVP Ramp. That pinched area may be quite a struggle to address, but apart from that, there’s definitely space for double-tracking.
North of Doncaster Diamond, the line is already double-tracked, although one of the two tracks is CN-exclusive currently.
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Good comments – but it is likely that this is a key determinant of the results of the cost/benefit study. A few details would be helpful.
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