The concept ML developed a decade ago is to relief half the lines to retain capacity at Union. They know they can’t do that for Barrie and Kitchener Lines.
In my experience the exhibition crowds are spread out over the day, and are a fraction of those from major sporting events at BMO Field.
Technically, it is 4 interchange stations, but only 3 of them are downtown.
GO trains will be significantly more frequent as well by the time the OL opens. And with only 3 stops (compared to 15 plus a transfer) it will almost certainly be faster than the subway for that trip.
Going to bring that Eglinton crosstown energy to dt.
Add another ~5 years or so to the most cynical timeline for the OL you can think of!
Well, it should be faster. I'm not sure I trust GO though to remove the 5-minute padding at Union (it's a 7-minute lay-over now). This has only gotten longer in recent years. Nor do I trust them to not break the line into two at Union. Or finish speeding up the track speeds through Union.
It depends what you count. There's been closures on Adelaide while they've been building the detour streetcar track, so they can close Queen Street.
Fair enough. Although it occurs to me that GO expansion (including the Union Station platform project and rail upgrades) and Ontario line are both Infrastructure Ontario projects. So if you don't trust that the GO and Union Station work will get completed then surely that same lack of trust extends to the Ontario Line. I think they'll all get done. The widened platforms will reduce dwell times at Union, plus electrification and track upgrades will speed up trains.
The excess dwell time at Union isn't because of the crowds. It's scheduled that way to improve on-time performance, to improve their KPIs.
once the infrastructure and service is in place nothing is stopping them from upgrading to EMUs later.
Exactly. This is the most likely outcome anyway. It would be insanely costly to replace the entire GO Fleet now, plus refit all the maintenance yards for EMUs. We have more bi-level passenger cars than we could ever find a buyer for, so it's far more cost effective to just switch to locomotives, and use the existing rail cars until they hit their service life. Given that likely will happen over a number of years, it feels most likely that we'll see a transition to EMUs line by line as the existing fleet ages out of service. It'll be much easier to resell a few dozen electric locomotives than hundreds of passenger cars.
And nothing has stopped them upgrading to DMUs for the last 55 years. And yet here we are.
Of course they'll be keeping the bi-levels. But at the same time, there's going to be expansions, so there's no point buying more bi-levels. New equipment can be a mix of electric locomotives, and new EMU trains - there's no reason they can't be run mixed in with electric locomotives.
With the service expansions and increases, they are going to need more cars. Unless there's a solid plan in place, to start buying some EMUs, we'll see more bi-levels similar to what we have now.