Line 6 Finch West opened for service on Sunday, December 7. Beside the basic issue of glacial train speed are questions of vehicle and infrastructure reliability. This post summarizes the delays that occurred.
This post is far more detailed than I would normally publish, but the information found its way to me, and a clear understanding of what is going on is in the public interest.
Although the TTC takes the blame for rotten operations, their shuttle buses keep service available to riders. The overwhelming cause of delay is with systems provided and maintained by Metrolinx’ P3 partner, Mosaic. It is extremely difficult to believe that these are new conditions that suddenly manifested when passengers actually rode the trains. Equipment reliability should have been proven in the acceptance process. As for switches failing to operate in cold weather, this is not exactly new technology for Toronto, and in any event Metrolinx claimed that the line had already been through cold weather testing before it opened.
A common delay is that a car’s control system will throw a fault code, but no cause was determined and the car continued in service. Some fault codes cause an emergency brake application including an overspeed condition. These happen often enough to suggest that speed restrictions with automatic stops are set far too conservatively.
Some delays arise from misalignment of cars with platforms. This could be either due to operator error, or to braking issues. Doors are not supposed to be opened with a car in the wrong place, but manual emergency mode operation is to be needed to properly reposition a car.
Some problems with maintaining schedule were reported due to operators unfamiliar with the line. This raises the question of training and the amount of experience they received before revenue operations began.
Aside from equipment failures are delays caused by “vehicle not available”. There are 18 cars in the fleet, and peak service requires 15 leaving three spare for maintenance and change offs of cars from service. It is Mosaic’s job to have those cars available. This problem grew as the week went on. Note that service improvements will be possible only by operating cars on a shorter trip time at the speed originally expected of the line. There are no extra cars to add to the service.
It would be fascinating to read and compare the logs from a few weeks before opening during the final acceptance process. How many of these problems were common then, and was the rate of failures considered “acceptable”? We will probably never know thanks to Metrolinx and TTC secrecy.
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Steve Munro 