What does "Speedster" mean?

The Sarnia is actually one of the best places to use a short Venture consist, since most of the line is so slow that the speed restriction at crossing is actually faster than the track speed. Plus 80km is owned by Metrolinx who doesn't impose those speed restrictions. I think Windsor-Toronto is...

I suspect the reason that Via didn't take any significant actions to mitigate the millions of dollars in financial damages caused by the speed restrictions is that they were hoping to measure those damages to support their case in court and hopefully collect that money back from CN. It appears...

Why are we assuming that shunt enhancers are required? Nearly every other railway on the planet manages to detect small trains just fine without shunt enhancers. The issue is specifically with a few models of level crossing gates that CN chose to install. Via's 24-axle trains meet Transport...

WHAT?! Via has been running J-trains since before the Siemens trains were even ordered! Combining 50/60 and 52/62 makes a big difference to rail traffic on Lakeshore East in the morning peak. How could Siemens possibly claim that their product doesn't support J-train operations? I've summarized...

It's not a contradiction. The paragraph basically says: We currently have CN so it doesn't work. If we did build a dedicated government owned railway it could work.

It's not just the tourists, there's also a ton of suburban development happening - it looks like Elora and Fergus will merge into one big suburban blob within a decade. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to approve such a big suburban expansion with literally no public transit, but in...

If the routes run every 30 minutes then it is possible to time them to meet the trains that run every 60 minutes. Those numbers are multiples of each other. It is not necessary to improve frequencies to provide short wait times for transfers to/from the GO train. The GO train comes at 1...

Guelph Central Station is in downtown Guelph. It's good that there's no parking - we don't want to encourage people to drive downtown just to park their cars there. Local transit doesn't need frequent service to be a competitive option to access all-day train service, since the trains will only...

According to their white paper, they ran it not-in-service for a year on the Greenford Branch. Presumably the next step would be to do that again, but in service. Also according to that white paper, they are using a fast-charger at West Ealing, which is a very energy-intensive way of powering...

Mainline battery reminds me of the promise and reality of light rail in Ontario. In theory, allowing a rapid transit system to have level crossings can enable you to build a line as fast as a subway at a fraction of the construction cost. Canada's first LRT - the Edmonton Capital Line - did...

Or CN could fix their defective railway crossings... It's not all crossings, it's only a specific type of crossing.

I can see why someone travelling specifically from Winston Churchill or Erin Mills would avoid GO due to price, but that is not where most of the ridership on the 109 comes from. I'm pretty sure Square One alone has more ridership to Kipling than Erin Mills and Winston Churchill combined. The...

I also prefer that, but the fact is that most people don't think like us. We are much more willing to take risks and adjust plans in real time to optimize our trips than the average person because we have a much more comprehensive understanding of how transit works. The average person loses...

Most people don't want a trip that has a 10% chance of missed connection. That's too risky for them. They want a predictable trip that gets them to their destination at the time the schedule said it would. Basically the transfer time should be however much is needed to make sure that the bus...

Yes technically the GO bus is more expensive but the fare difference between GO and MiWay is only $0.30. I just take whatever shows up first, and if it's a GO bus I'm happy to pay the extra 30 cents to get much more comfortable seats and a slightly faster trip. For a trip Square One - Kipling -...

I did another one of my surveys of bus service in the Ottawa-Toronto corridor. Several changes since the last one: - Red Arrow is now operating under the Orléans Express brand, which means ordinary 56-passenger coach buses rather than luxury buses, and no more catering service. However, they've...

Route 48 does go GuelphU - Bramalea - Hwy 407 but it's not timed to meet trains at Bramalea and it doesn't go all the way to Guelph Central. But the deviation to Meadowvale takes so long that even with a timed train connection it wouldn't be that much faster to Guelph Central. It would be...

According to the timetable archive on my computer (which is more up-to-date than the Google Drive I linked earlier), those trips appeared on the 28th of June 2025. It seems that they were added to introduce 15-minute local service from Burlington to Toronto (previously 15-minute service was only...

Pre-Covid there were 8 express trains per day in each direction, with a total of 6 trains per hour in the peak hour (4 express, 2 local). Local service only ran every 30 minutes during peak periods - 15-minute local service wasn't introduced until 2021 (when it was changed to 2 express, 4...