thenewguy
New Member
Walkley Station on Line 2. Pictures taken on July 9.
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- Thread starter hoggytime
- Start date
CapitalSeven
Senior Member
Well, it's official, or semi-official: The plan for efficient airport rail travel is a failure and plan B will be put into effect, at least to begin with.
The New Ways to Bus subsite has an online travel planner and schedule page. If you wade through the schedules for routes 2 and 4, you'll deduce that the operations plan using the pocket track at South Keys (I put in a copy on page one of this thread) has been quietly abandoned. This would have seen the line 4 train dropping passengers from the airport just before the line 2 passing meet, and then picking up new ones for the airport a couple of minutes later.
Instead, the new schedules show that the line 4 train will simply pull into South Keys for a three-minute turnaround about half way through the 12 minute cycle. The transit time will be seven minutes instead of the two or so that were promised, and the train will take nine minutes to slowly trundle the 2.5 miles to the airport. The two directions will meet at Uplands, with a similar three-minute turnaround at the airport.
The original operational plan was not some notion; it was built into the contract documents, but apparently having built the pocket track at considerable expense, the operator has given up and will leave it unused. No doubt if pressed on this, OC Transpo will present this as an improvement (more reliable, simpler) and fail to acknowledge that travel will now be five minutes slower. Indeed, the travel planner shows a trip to Parliament station will be much slower than the current system (see below).
While this is not quite on par with the inept expansion debacle of 2014, it appears to be another example of OC Transpo promising something and delivering much, much less while wasting millions.
The New Ways to Bus subsite has an online travel planner and schedule page. If you wade through the schedules for routes 2 and 4, you'll deduce that the operations plan using the pocket track at South Keys (I put in a copy on page one of this thread) has been quietly abandoned. This would have seen the line 4 train dropping passengers from the airport just before the line 2 passing meet, and then picking up new ones for the airport a couple of minutes later.
Instead, the new schedules show that the line 4 train will simply pull into South Keys for a three-minute turnaround about half way through the 12 minute cycle. The transit time will be seven minutes instead of the two or so that were promised, and the train will take nine minutes to slowly trundle the 2.5 miles to the airport. The two directions will meet at Uplands, with a similar three-minute turnaround at the airport.
The original operational plan was not some notion; it was built into the contract documents, but apparently having built the pocket track at considerable expense, the operator has given up and will leave it unused. No doubt if pressed on this, OC Transpo will present this as an improvement (more reliable, simpler) and fail to acknowledge that travel will now be five minutes slower. Indeed, the travel planner shows a trip to Parliament station will be much slower than the current system (see below).
While this is not quite on par with the inept expansion debacle of 2014, it appears to be another example of OC Transpo promising something and delivering much, much less while wasting millions.