Getting the impression that things could move much, much faster if everyone was willing to swallow the pain of a half-year's closure of a line at a time.

JNR privatisation was also the context in which controversial but effective streamlining took place. In the final JNR years and in the immediate aftermath of privatisation half of the enormous 414,000-strong workforce was laid off or put to early retirement.Half of the combined workforce of the...

By coincidence, I and some others had been discussing a Parliament streetcar earlier. I started organising some thoughts here https://kaptrice.blogspot.com/2026/02/thinking-about-parliament-streetcar.html but never finished. In my opinion a minimal-infrastructure, weak-priority (think RapidTO...

The YouTube video is my footage. I recorded on Video8. By 2007, when ECLRT was proposed with Transit City, it was reaching obsolescence but still in consumer use. I would have used Digital8, which my memories from 2007 are recorded on, but I don't have a working camera for it. The Instagram post...

AM peak hour means the peak hour.

https://www.railway-technology.com/news/automatic-gangway-coupling-and-a-whole-new-stadler/ Relatedly, there was a pilot of a new automatic gangway coupler technology that was supposed to take place this year on the subway. I wonder if it'll be used for the new fleet, too.

They would run at service level 7, which has longer headways than service level 6. Service level 1 is premised on 2-RV trains.

When you are tracking things like systems integration tests, station occupancy, and so on, they do not increase linearly with time from the start of the project.

They are actually Škoda 7Ev of the ČD! This isn't the first development in Waterloo whose renderings they've shown up in.

Metrolinx has pretty constricting hot weather work restrictions depending on the outside temperature.

The stated capacity at the planned service level in the AM peak is in fact only 75% of this, a little under 6000.

The maximum theoretical capacity with the current 2 car trains is about 5,500 pphpd, and the maximum possible operable service is something like 7,600. These are the numbers used for the service levels. The idea of being able to reliably stuff 200, let alone 250, people into one LRV and operate...

The doors on the LRVs are also rather narrower than those on the subway, even the double doors. One need only go ride on them - in Waterloo or Edmonton or elsewhere - to note that it's a bit trickier to get to and through the doors on them. Needless to say the problem gets worse if you have 160+...

I would note that the Metrolinx website still mentions "nearly 10,000" weekly trips, as well as 20% faster travel on the LSE page. I don't know if this is still true or not.

Thanks for your post. In general, the expansion/RER programme seems like it must do the better part of a century's worth of railway modernisations for a fairly sizable network under the framework of a megaproject. That's, I feel, behind a lot of the conflicting things to be felt. Incidentally...