Vehicles

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New Carhouses for New Cars (Updated)

The TTC Supplementary Agenda for May 21 includes a report on the Master Plan for new carhouses.  These will be needed both to house the replacement fleet for the existing downtown network and for the far-flung Transit City system.

In brief, the proposed scheme involves the building of five new carhouses:

  • One in either the Portlands or in New Toronto to house the downtown network’s fleet.  The New Toronto option is mentioned only once in the text  (with “new” in lower case), and the map shows only the Portlands location.  This would be the primary carhouse for the core area routes, but Roncesvalles and Russell would continue to have a role as regional yards for new cars once the CLRV fleet starts to retire.
  • A Sheppard East carhouse would initially operate the Sheppard line, but later take on the Scarborough/Malvern and part of Eglinton once the Malvern link was in place.
  • A Finch West carhouse would serve that line and, eventually, part of the Jane line as well.
  • An Eglinton West carhouse would serve the Eglinton line initially, and later the Jane and, possibly, the St. Clair line.
  • A Don Mills carhouse would serve the Don Mills line and possibly part of Sheppard.  By the time we get this far into the plan, there will no doubt be more Transit City proposals on the table and it’s anyone’s guess what the real carhouse needs will be.

The four Transit City carhouses are estimated at about $770-million (reference year not stated), while the new downtown carhouse is estimated at $330-million due to the larger fleet it must house.    It’s clear that the long-term status of the existing Russell and Roncesvalles buildings is dubious both because they are not suited to house and maintain the new cars, and because of building code issues if they were to undergo major changes.  However, these properties provide a few advantages over a consolidated operation in the Portlands.

  • If they are used as yards with basic servicing facilities, the dead-head time for cars entering and leaving service will be shorter than if everything funnels back to a Portlands carhouse.
  • As riding grows on the existing system, the TTC needs somewhere to store more than the initial 204 low flow cars they plan to order this year.  The existing yards will provide an overflow.  Whether both of them are needed once all of the existing CLRVs and ALRVs are retired is another question, but that’s almost a decade away.

Note that the map used in this report is the original Transit City map and does not reflect any of the optional changes that have cropped up in discussions about some routes.  It also doesn’t show the new Waterfront East lines, nor the Kingston Road project.  With luck, one of these days, the TTC will start using a new base map for all of its surface rail project reports.

Updated May 21:

The dates for new carhouse availability are driven both by the expected arrival of the new fleet for the downtown system and for the opening dates of the Transit City lines.

The demonstration prototype cars are to arrive at the end of 2010, and it is likely they will be temporary stored and serviced at Hillcrest.  The first 20 production cars will arrive by the end of 2012, and they will need a carhouse and shops.  This sets the date for the Portlands carhouse to be available.  The complete replacement fleet arrives by the end of 2017.

There are seven Transit City lines (not to mention other plans such as Waterfront East and Kingston Road).  The startup dates and estimated fleets for each of these lines are:

  • Sheppard East:  2012 / 35
  • Finch West:  2013 /37
  • Eglinton:  2015 /129
  • Waterfront West:  2015 / 23
  • Don Mills:  2016 / 46
  • Jane:  2017: /41
  • Scarborough Malvern:  2018 / 53

At least 90% of this fleet, possibly with the addition of cars for the St. Clair line, will be housed in the four new carhouses all of which should have room to accommodate growth in requirements.

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Arithmetic Lessons for Fleet Planners

Today’s Commission meeting included one of the more embarrassing presentations I have seen at the TTC in some time.  It wasn’t meant that way, but that’s how it came off.  The topic was the Subway Service Improvement Plan.

The first problem was that this is really two reports in one.  The first major topic is delays, their causes and what the TTC is doing or can do to reduce them.  This material was presented in a less than thrilling manner, and most Commissioners were visibly not paying attention.

The second topic was the subway car fleet plan.  This has always been something of a black art influenced as much by whatever size order Bombardier needs to have for Thunder Bay this week rather than solid planning.  However, when the TTC’s own numbers don’t add up and there are blatant mistakes in the analysis, that’s when it gets embarrassing.

The report is not available online, and you will have to take my word for the material as I don’t feel like scanning the whole thing in.  A warning for the faint of heart.  This post contains a lot of numbers and a discussion of service levels and fleet requirements.  If this isn’t your cup of tea, skip the rest of this item. Continue reading →

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A Day on the TTC

Robert Wightman sent in the following comment about problems maintaining service on, mainly, the streetcar system on Tuesday, March 25.

I spent yesterday afternoon rush hour working at home and listening to the scanner for TTC surface operations and this is what I heard.

Russell could not send out all scheduled service because they did not have enough equipment available. A car on Carlton and one on Queen went disabled and had to be pushed to Russell. This took 4 cars out of service and screwed up the lines for awhile. The line inspectors must know that a Commissioner lives in the Beach because they turned two WB cars at Russell and sent them back to Neville.

A fight broke out on a WB Queen car in front of the City Hall so the WB service went along Richmond to York thus bypassing the delay and the subway.

A Spadina car went disabled in the Station and had to be pushed out. They decided to push it out to the street before locking out the brakes, bad move as it lost air on the curve and they had to crank the brakes off. They could not use the spare track as there was a car using it to “dry out”. It was waiting for the emergency truck as it had no fans and the windows were too steamed up to see out. This screwed up Spadina for a while.

Another car broke a bar under the front truck and had to be escorted back to Russell by the emergency truck. Again there was no vehicle available to replace it.

The emergency trucks were running all over the system making minor repairs to cars that were still in service but had no heat, one wiper missing, doors that wouldn’t open, lights that didn’t work.

The subway had a train with a pair of cars that went disabled so they drove it onto the tail track at Finch until they could fix it.

The system is broke and it isn’t getting fixed. The Inspectors managed to find enough cars that were to run in to replace the missing cars after the rush hour. How much of the service problems are caused by equipment failures each day? Yesterday was not good weather but this still seemd like a lot of problems for one rush hour.

Both equipment and operator shortages remain a big problem especially for the streetcar system. We need some honest answers from the TTC about just how many cars are really available for service and why so many are sitting in the shop. I don’t think the situation has been presented with as much urgency as it deserves, and we still face the impact of having the St. Clair line fully back in operation sometime this fall or winter. New cars won’t be here for years, assuming we somehow find a way to find them this fall when it’s time to place the order.

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Our New Streetcar: The TTC Wants To Hear From You! Really! (Update 3)

Updated Dec. 19 at midnight:

At the Dec. 18th TTC meeting, the reports linked below were discussed along with a technical report and appendix from Booz Allen.  Note that these links point to the National Post’s site where they are linked from this article.  As and when the TTC puts them on its own website, I will alter this link to point to the TTC’s copies.

Thanks to Mark Dowling for alerting me to the documents on the Post’s site.

From a friend who attended the meeting, I learned that organized labour made a strong showing arguing for Canadian content and, of course, for the contract to go to Bombardier in Thunder Bay.  Some members of the Commission echoed this position.  I can’t help thinking that they are overplaying their hands on this one.

First off, Bombardier is the only potential bidder with a Canadian rail car manufacturing facility, and this gives them a leg up on costs against any other contender.  Second, the TTC’s decision to opt for a 100% low-floor specification narrows the field of potential suppliers.  At this point, I would be extremely surprised to see more than two bids for this contract, and given the obvious inside track Bombardier has, why Siemens would waste their money bidding against them is a difficult question. 

This gives us the impression of an open proposal call, but there is clear evidence of a desired outcome, and we’re back at the Toronto Rocket subway car order mess all over again.  Light Rail has enough problems in Toronto, not to mention an uphill battle to secure funding from Queen’s Park and Ottawa, without the odour of a predetermined contract.  The last thing we need is for Ottawa to say “you didn’t run the bid properly” as an excuse to back away.

Booz Allen is a major consulting firm for Light Rail projects, among others, and has participated in many studies and designs for new and expanded systems.  The material in their report is drawn from  experience on other systems, and they are vendor-independent.

The information here is no surprise to anyone familiar with the component costs of rapid transit vehicles.  A very large proportion of the new LRVs will be sourced offshore because that’s where components are manufactured.  Half of the cost per car comes from components that are not manufactured in Canada, and this order of LRVs isn’t remotely close to the quantity that would justify anyone setting up a local plant.

Because any 100% low floor car will be based on a European design, the engineering and fabrication work will be done overseas since the expertise and facilities already exist. 

Best case, Booz Allen estimates that 25% of the value of the car order can be provided in Canada, and of this, a goodly chunk is not going to be the work of the folks at Thunder Bay.

If the TTC were to insist on a higher Canadian content, this would effectively lock out every bidder except Bombardier, and even then Toronto would pay a premium to have overseas manufacturing capability duplicated in Canada.  Indeed, if the Can-Con level is set too high, nobody will bid.

Whoever gets this order will be building light rail equipment for the Toronto area for decades.  As I have said before, I have no brief for any would-be supplier, but want only that Toronto gets an excellent car at a good price. 

This contract, plus the Transit City add-ons, will give us Toronto’s streetcar/LRV fleet well into this century.  This is our last chance, after all the years wasted on alternatives, to get LRT right, for it to be a credible form of transit in the GTA.  The last thing we need is a lemon, or “the Edsel of streetcars” as a former TTC Chief General Manager described the CLRVs.

The Request for Proposals will be issued in early 2008.  The next moves are up to the potential bidders and transit’s “funding partners” to prove how serious they are about the future of rail transit in Toronto. Continue reading →

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A Short History of the CLRV

Now that we’re on the verge of acquiring, or at least issuing a proposal call for a fleet of new streetcars, it’s worth looking back at the origins of the Canadian Light Rail Vehicle and its travails on the Toronto system.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive history, and some comments here are strongly coloured by my own experiences with the fights to keep a streetcar system alive in Toronto and transit technology debates in general.  Bear with me.  My thesis will be revealed in time.

Back in the mid 1960s, the TTC had a plan to build a network of suburban streetcar lines (what we would now call “LRT” or “Light Rapid Transit”) including, notably, a circumferential line made up of:

  • A route from Warden Station (then the planned eastern terminus of the BD subway) northeast through Scarborough to Malvern, connecting to
  • A Finch hydro corridor route west to roughly the Humber River, connecting to
  • A diagonal route following the hydro corridors in Etobicoke and eventually coming south to connect with the BD subway.
  • In addition, there would be a spur to the airport, and another north-south link between the Finch line and the Spadina Subway.

That was 1966.  The proposed vehicle for this network was an updated version of the PCC, the streetcar which served as the backbone of the transit system until the arrival of the CLRV fleet 40 years later.  Plans existed, even a brochure describing the car.  And then everything stopped. Continue reading →

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Siemens’ Combino Plus Campaign

A wraparound ad on the August 16 issue of 24 Hours extols Siemens new streetcars and refers readers to a website with more information. The layout has the earmarks of an ongoing advertising campaign with cheeky copy:

The Siemens page includes an animated look at the Combino Plus car as proposed for Toronto including simulation of the car on the Spadina and Queen lines.  There is a link to a data sheet on the Lisbon version of the car as well as a non-functioning [as of noon on August 17]  link to a Melbourne presentation.

A Siemens mockup is on view at the CNE grounds on Princes’ Boulevard along with the Bombardier mockup that appeared recently at Dundas Square. 

If you get bored with the streetcars, you can watch people getting fired out of a cannon.  Whether this will be yet another alternative for transit service remains to be seen.

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We Get Letters

I have received a number of comments recently that have turned rather more abusive about past efforts by myself and others.  Also, I’ve had comments that attempt to trivialize the advocacy of LRT as railfan nostalgia. 

Please note that anyone who posts such comments will simply fall off the earth as far as my publishing any future feedback they might have, and they should spend their time elsewhere. Continue reading →

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Our Not So New Streetcars

When I was digging in my files for the Queen Subway post just below this one, I ran across a report from December 1972 entitled Streetcar Replacement Policy that discussed the implications of the decision on November 7, 1972, to retain the streetcar system.

Late in 1971, the Commission forces establish a set of parameters for new streetcars if the replacement of all or part of the present fleet was to be considered.  These were discussed with Hawkey Siddeley Canada Limited [now part of Bombardier] who advised that they would be interested in the manufacture, and at a price of approximately $173,000 per car.

The report goes on to say that with some simplification of the control system, this price could be reduced by about $22K, and compares these estimates with those for more complex articulated cars proposed for Boston and San Francisco at a cost of about $400K.  Those would turn out to be the ill-fated Boeing cars.  Philadelphia is mentioned as a possible partner with the TTC for new streetcars, and a joint venture with that system is proposed. Continue reading →