Day: January 31, 2024

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The Scarborough RT Derailment Technical Reports

Back in September 2023, TTC management presented an overview of the investigation into the July 24, 2023 accident that marked the end of the SRT’s life. See also my article Line 3 SRT Replacement Service and Derailment Investigation.

At the time, detailed reports from the technical investigation were supposed to appear in “a few weeks”, but there has not been any public presentation of this material to the TTC Board.

To my surprise while hunting down reports about the Scarborough RT busway, I found the derailment investigation reports well hidden on the TTC’s site. To see them, you have to:

  • Go to the Projects and Plans page which is accessed through a footer menu on every TTC page. Yes, right down at the bottom.
  • Scroll down to The Future of of TTC’s Line 3 Scarborough (SRT).
  • Click on View Details.
  • Scroll down within that page to News Releases, Reports & Community Updates
  • Open that section and scroll down to November 16, 2023 (there is also one report listed under December 11, 2023)

Here you will find links to the following reports (which I provide here to save you the bother of chasing through the path above). The dates of the reports are shown together with those for earlier drafts in the change logs, where present.

There is a lot of reading here, but the reports are more thorough and informative than the brief TTC overview since the accident. An important distinction the reports reveal is the degree to which identified issues were not at the single derailment site, but common to other parts of the line and to TTC maintenance practices.

Various reviews concluded that the problem lay with the reaction rail mounts and the ability of segments of this rail to move due to forces from the linear induction motors (LIM) on the SRT trains. Several factors contributed to this including:

  • The inherent tight clearances of the LIM design,
  • variations and errors in the selection and installation of reaction rail supports and rail components,
  • an inspection scheme that underrated the severity of problems and the necessity for prompt repairs,
  • the difficulty of inspecting reaction rail mounting hardware, and
  • the need for training of inspection and maintenance staff so that they understand the behaviour of track systems and the failure modes that they must prevent.

Of particular concern is that a reaction rail defect was reported two weeks before the accident at the derailment site, but it was assigned a low priority in the maintenance hierarchy likely because the severity of the problem was not understood.

There are lessons here for maintenance practices in general and I cannot help thinking that the recent detailed review of subway track geometry, resulting slow orders and repairs is partly in response to the problems discovered on the SRT.

I know that readers will not have time to plough through the full reports, but they contain details beyond what I have included here for those who are interested. This article is a summary of the main points together with an introduction to the SRT propulsion technology to put the other material into context.

Source: Hatch LTK Report
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Eighteen

January 31, 2006 saw the first post on this blog, a compendium of film festival reviews I wrote going back to the dark ages of 1986 on another platform, the long-departed “Artworks” BBS. Many readers will recall text-based systems and the whine of 2400-baud dial-up modems connecting us to the outside world.

Among other films in that 1986 batch were Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Itami’s Tampopo which brought new meaning to the term “spaghetti western”, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. (Try to imagine seeing that film for the first time when nobody in the audience knew what to expect.) There was also a little film called Malcolm about a reclusive lad who had an inordinate fascination with Melbourne’s trams.

I stopped doing reviews years ago because major political events kept getting in the way, and more recently I prefer to see films on a more leisurely basis without the lineups. Toronto’s cultural scene has been through many ups and downs over the years, but the reps survive somehow, and even the gorilla on King Street, TIFF, hopes to weather the combined effects of the pandemic, film industry strikes, and the fall in tourism. There’s enough to keep me out and about (now that we can be out and about again) on many evenings and quite a few matinees.

The second post went up on Groundhog Day 2006, A Bold Initiative for Don Valley Transport with a plan for Swan Boats, the product of much 2am hilarity with a dear friend. Newcomers to the scene ask about my Twitter/X handle. If only they knew. Fantasy transit maps have nothing on our imagination!

At the risk of really dating myself, 2023 was the 60th anniversary of my first non-trivial computer programming. It was on an LGP-30 that was on loan to the Toronto Board of Education for enrichment classes. My program was a random sentence generator that would spit out grammatically correct, albeit totally nonsense text. This was not on a par with teaching HAL to sing, but it gave me a healthy suspicion of the claims for AI when that field started years later.

2023 brought departures of friends and transit colleagues, not uncommon for someone of my generation, and they are much missed. But there is much new blood with a strong interest in making a better city. A particular strength is that transit activism is now city-wide and cannot be dismissed as the preserve of downtowners and railfans.

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