Could SOME of the European regulations (and keep in mind, there are few standardized railway regulations continent-wide) work here? I am sure that there are likely some. Could all of them be imported wholesale? No - not without completely changing how the railroads operate here. And that's the...

The maps there are wrong for the Ontario Line. There is a single facing crossover half-way between Don Valley and Sunnybrook Park Station. And then there is that scissors crossover on the ramp east of Don Valley Station, on approach to Aga Khan Station. I don't know where the section breaks...

Closing off the tracks to freight also means closing off the tracks to VIA (and eventually ALTO). It also means preventing GO trains from running to places where Metrolinx doesn't yet own track, like Richmond Hill, Brampton, Kitchener, Hamilton and Niagara Falls. So yeah, we'll end up with a...

Is this a recent development? The RDCs have wyed there many, many times over the years. Dan

OnXpress had a detailed plan for quite some length out into the future. I don't know the specific details, but they did account for things like lead times - not just with buying new equipment, but also with the works required on the railroad. Dan

No, we are not talking about electric locos - nothing that elaborate was put out to tender. What was put out to tender was things like rebuilding some of the passenger cars, including the cab cars. Buying the second-hand Metrolinx locos, and working with ONR to come up with a plan for...

It was the plan that they formulated that was then acted upon. They came up with the plan to operate more, smaller trains. That got approved, and then went to equipment, who looked at how the current fleet was configured and what needed to change in order to operate that plan. Options were...

The Citadis Spririt has a new truck design which, as far as I can tell, is unprecedented in its use under a low-floor LRT car. It is an inside-framed truck with swing link suspension - but with motors and gearboxes mounted outboard of the wheels. All of those things have long existed...

They were fired. Do you think OnXpress' operations staff is still around? Dan

In theory, yes, this could be a use case for them. They also have a far greater range before needing to be fueled, so that would solve one of the concerns I laid out above. They are indeed capable of running only on the battery, and in fact the TTC has enabled it in certain locations such as...

First off, all-in-all this was an excellent post. But I do want to point out this particular passage: It's not just operational staff. A lot of the staff supporting them - and especially in your case, the guys in charge of track blocks for example - are dealing with the same issues as you...

This has nothing to do with COVID. Shortly after Alstom was told that they were not going to get the operating and maintenance contract in 2023, they put into place a hiring freeze. Their logic was that "why should we pay to train these people if we aren't going to reap the rewards of their...

No, they can't. First off, the drivers need to be trained on them. Very few of the drivers at Queensway are, and those are just drivers who've recently moved from other divisions. And you can't force them to work on a weekend if they've chosen work that gives them weekends off. Second: are the...

thettctransitfanatic's point about the maintainers is a pretty good one. But keep in mind that the SRT's end time didn't align with the subway's, either. It's last trip outbound was at about the same time as the subway's last trip westbound - which meant that it ended service about 25 minutes...

There is no such work on the Bala Sub - yet. At least not for any signalling changes or installations regarding ETCS. All they announced was that they were going to use the Bala Sub for their testbed, in advance to rolling the system out system-wide. Dan