[smably]

Wow, you folks need to read your Orwell!

"Doubleplusunsmart" = Newspeak = language designed to intentionally obfuscate meaning (from 1984) = ironic comment on Metrolinx' communication on this project, e.g., saying "up to 29 trains per day" where there was no intention until recently to actually run anywhere near that much service.

 

[nfitz]

Well they could say that, other than an informed poster here....I have seen no information from GO/ML that that is the case. In fact, if it is a case of freeing up crews after the Pan Ams..would they not have some idea of how many crews there will be freed up?

Oh, I'm sure they know pretty much what they are going to to. Yes they could say. But they've been hugely conservative before. We heard rumours about them 30-minute service on Lakeshore increasingly for years before they finally announced it, and then didn't give that much notice about it.

Your right, they could give more information. But for some reason they are paranoid about giving detail ahead of time. I guess they don't want to commit to something that then doesn't happen for budget reasons. The lack of transparency at GO compared to municipal agencies is clear.

But we've certainly been getting the kind of rumours about September 2015 that we have gotten about other rail increases in recent years.

 

[innsertnamehere]

We got rumours of Milton service for a while too, and that was finally announced a while ago. Truth is Metrolinx more than likely already has its service plan worked out, the question is simply what exactly it is.

 

[mdrejhon]

Longtimers will know the cancellation of a lot of historical GO plans, such as GO ALRT and the cancellation of the old Guelph GOTrain service in 1993.

Even as they're defacto constructing the 2nd Hamilton GOTrain station already (aka the proposed "Confederation Station" the new rail overpass near Walmart on Centennial Parkway has a platform built into it!), they haven't really truly announced its opening...yet. For PanAm games they're focussed on the JamesNorth station and the Lewis yard for overnight parking of trains in Hamilton. Suddenly, in 2016 or 2017, after redoing the Ha they will announce Hamilton as the new all-day 30min service terminus instead of Aldershot. I hope.

Back on topic, the Georgetown corridor means there's no more level crossings for Tory's SmartTrack between Eglington and Union. That should help things along quite a bit for Tory. Lots of work will be done, but SmartTrack needs this corridor, so billions more will come to put more track here and complete things more.

All upcoming myraid services that run along the Georgetown corridor (SmartTrack, UPX, GO RER, and it's on the proposed HSR route) -- means this corridor is pretty much guaranteed funds for years to come, even if half of those four projects are cancelled. It's now Toronto's most "future critical" corridor.

 

[crs1026]

One can empathise with whatever enthusiastic staffer wrote that bulletin - it's been a long project and well worth celebrating some of the bigger accomplishments e.g. the completion of grade separation....but this type of communication is not constructive.

First, the project is not complete....there is a lot of track to put in service yet, the signalling is only partly operational, and the stations are far from ready.....just to get the UPX moving is a lot more work. The Weston Tunnel itself will need a lot of work before the corridor is remediated through Weston. I don't think anyone on site (I was there on Friday, to watch the last trains take the at-grade route into town) will say the job is "finished".)

Second, the gap between what has been built and what is needed for 2WAD is huge.

The risk is that politicians, and media, and the public will say "we solved that one, now we can move on" when in fact we are at least a Billion dollars (or two, or three....who knows?) of additional construction away from achieving 2WAD on that route. When GO comes back to ask for funds to finish the project, the reaction from Joe Public will be "What, more money?".

I am feeling some of my crankier and more cyncial posts about this project are pretty much vindicated today....it's very difficult to get a factual statement about where things stand or what's actually committed.

Anyways, the weekend's milestone is still a big step forward. And here's the difference 45 years makes for commuters in Weston

- Paul

 

[Markster]

Wow, you folks need to read your Orwell!

"Doubleplusunsmart" = Newspeak = language designed to intentionally obfuscate meaning (from 1984) = ironic comment on Metrolinx' communication on this project, e.g., saying "up to 29 trains per day" where there was no intention until recently to actually run anywhere near that much service.

Actually, my joke was that I got fooled into thinking that "We've always been planning for all-day 15 minute service" (war with Eastasia), when that specific promise is relatively recent, as opposed to the "up to 29 trains" (war with Oceania) promise.
I felt dumb (double plus unsmart) for forgetting how recent the change in "goal" was.

 

[mdrejhon]

It was dark in there and my reception of cbc radio disappeared....that is all I can report.

Tweet to Rogers, Bell, Telus about it. Enough people get dropped calls and copmlaints, they'll install some cell capacity to prevent dropped calls in the tunnel.

 

[innsertnamehere]

I may be hyper sensitive to this subject (I freely admit that) but in the email from the GTS project team about this landmark moment there seems to be a subtle shift in the messaging.

Whereas it used to talk about how important the GTS project was in increasing the rail corridor's capacity to allow for more service to commence in the corridor it now says:



This is either an inadvertent slip in messaging in a hope to get people looking forward to the "full service" and forgetting that what the customers on the line are looking for is those "up to 29" train trips a day in 2015.....or they are intentionally pushing the message out delaying any improvements until they can deliver all of them.....honestly hope it is the former not the latter (but it is not helped when you can't get a response, never mind an answer, to the direct question of how many and when the new trains will there be).

On the bright side, this is the email that declares, essentially, GTS completed.

Metrolinx is pretty adamant about gradual improvements towards that 15 minute service rather than just opening it one day. They discussed this same thing at the board meeting last week, and it was said that there will be gradual service increases every year ramping up to the 15 minute service. Stuff like all day service on Kitchener will be part of it, along with all day service to mount joy as planned in the EA. The stuff that's good to go in terms of environmental assessments are moving forward already with funding from the province.

 

[TOareaFan]

Tweet to Rogers, Bell, Telus about it. Enough people get dropped calls and copmlaints, they'll install some cell capacity to prevent dropped calls in the tunnel.

not a Telus issue....was listening (as I always do on GO) to CBC on the FM radio receiver included in the later versions of Blackberry 10 operating system......remember...back in the days of being able to listen to radio without using cell or data plan minutes?.....you still can (on the Q10 , Z30 and Passport models but not the Z10 for some reasons).

 

[TOareaFan]

Metrolinx is pretty adamant about gradual improvements towards that 15 minute service rather than just opening it one day. They discussed this same thing at the board meeting last week, and it was said that there will be gradual service increases every year ramping up to the 15 minute service. Stuff like all day service on Kitchener will be part of it, along with all day service to mount joy as planned in the EA. The stuff that's good to go in terms of environmental assessments are moving forward already with funding from the province.

That is great....when I asked last week if service improvements on this line were discussed at the board meeting there was no response...so I took it as a no.

That said, if there are to be "gradual service increases every year" then it would be nice if they could tell us what those are/might be and when they might happen.

 

[innsertnamehere]

They didn't specifically discuss Kitchener no, the meeting focused more on immediate construction projects (additional track on Barrie), and BCAs.

The reason we won't get year for year yet is because they probably don't know yet. They likely know what will come next year, but beyond that, they really don't know. It takes time to stick up schedules and even then who knows how accurate those will be. If you are expecting exact schedules for service in 2018, you aren't going to get those.

 

[TOareaFan]

They didn't specifically discuss Kitchener no, the meeting focused more on immediate construction projects (additional track on Barrie), and BCAs.

The reason we won't get year for year yet is because they probably don't know yet. They likely know what will come next year, but beyond that, they really don't know. It takes time to stick up schedules and even then who knows how accurate those will be. If you are expecting exact schedules for service in 2018, you aren't going to get those.

No....what I am looking for is "in X month of 2015 expect us to add X number of additional trains to your corridor".....what we get is "crickets, crickets"

 

[TOareaFan]

I agree with what your saying, GO/ML have always been very secretive about service increases and I think the reason for that is because they or rather the province has a very tight leash on the operational budget. Though to be honest I'm not really sure at what level the numbers get determined and who has the final say so I can't say for sure who's to blame, the general lack of transparency sure doesn't help in that regard. They've always had a just in time approach to getting new crews trained for additional service. I get that the province isn't in the best position financially right now. But when this approach has repeatedly backfired several times over by delaying new service(i.e. the 1/2hr service on the Lakeshore for example, although they would never admit that publicly) then maybe its time to do things a little differently perhaps? They use projections for everything, such as the average number of people expected to be on leave, out of service, sick days, when people are expected to finish training, etc, etc. But with how tight they are to their requirements all it takes to delay new service is a few extra people being unavailable for whatever reason or guys not getting qualified on schedule as expected. Which is exactly what has happened several times in the past. No doubt in the end they're left all confused, wondering why is it the numbers are higher than expected? Not realizing or rather not accepting, that reality can't always be projected. Then their left with an egg on their face when they realize that "X" cannot be done by "Y" time as projected. And again its not something that they will ever actually admit to, hence why they wait until the final minute to announce new service these days. But we can tell exactly whats going on. When the contractor has to do things like denying every single vacation or day off request for months on end or by starting to discipline people who are injury at work. Gosh, I love the victim blaming that goes on, "its your damn fault for not noticing that bar was installed to low!" And by generally telling us that we're the ones who need to get our shit together as a whole. Getting a little bit tired of that crap. But don't get me wrong, I do love the actual job we do and I'd like to think I'm pretty good at it to. But the behind the scenes politics can leave me shaking my head in amazement sometimes. So considering how GO is being run more and more like a corporation each day I seriously doubt they will become more forthcoming or ever learn their lesson and open the purse strings a bit little, which imo, would be more prudent than taking the just in time approach to everything for a public service.

Thanks for the reply....that said, today is actually a critical day....this is the day when all the planned grade separations are done and the line is operating without slow downs...so this matches the day that those of us who remember trains being cancelled to allow for this work are expecting +/- (based on the promises at the start of the work) for at least the return of those trains but, more likely, an improvement over that.....so today is the day that they should break their silence by telling us what service out of the "up to 29" trips are actually going to happen or, as it seems, some "reason" that this is not going to happen.

Yes, we should just randomly go about blowing up peoples homes just because we don't like how they look.

Blowing up homes, or in the earlier example the apartments at Crossways, would make transit planning/building easier.....there would be no need for regional transit if we all lived at Spadina and Front (to pick an intersection).

 

[mdrejhon]

Related topic...

See this vine of the new Georgetown tunnel and one of the first GOTrains going through it: https://vine.co/v/Ogz0EWFIguP

Look at the leftmost railroad, it uses concrete sleeper ties! Is that the UPX rail? How much of the route use concrete ties, between Union to Pearson? This type of sleeper tie can sustains higher speeds (200kph+ during straightways) than most of Metrolinxs' other tracks. Is this a hint of GO RER to come? Is this the specific track tomorrow's HSR will share, too? Either way, this will be interesting to see how this type of high speed capable track takes over Metrolinx's networks.

 

[crs1026]

GO/ML have always been very secretive about service increases and I think the reason for that is because they or rather the province has a very tight leash on the operational budget.

I have been told that when the summer GO service to Niagara was announced, there was a miscue between the political level and GO Operations which resulted in the plan for the new service leaking out before the politicians were able to get the credit. (It takes a certain amount of time to inform staff, allow employees to bid on the work, coordinate between agencies etc)
As a result, there is an edict that GO cannot announce any service change - even minor schedule changes - until Queens Park has approved the news release. This impacts connecting transit agencies, who do not know about even minor schedule changes in time to adjust connecting services - they are blindsided by any GO changes and get complaints from their customers who get left behind etc.

- Paul