Recent content by smallspy

It sounds like the train was ahead of schedule. If a train is substantially early into a station, the signal system will not allow it to leave. He may very well have been trying to keep the train from sitting on the platform for a while with the doors open. You see this on the bus and streetcar...

Sure, but we don't give those people the time-of-day. What you will get more arguments about is the level of subsidy. Some posters here have no concept about the value of money, and would like untold billions on brand new corridors to every corner of the country. There is a sweet spot to be...

Are they closer than they were 20 or even 10 years ago? You can look at the numbers yourself, they're in the public domain. But the general answer is "yes, they are". Are they close to being totally self-sustainable? Of course not. And there are dozens of reasons why this is the case. Some of...

That's the other side of demand management - historical trend monitoring. Fridays and Sundays are historically the busiest days of the week for VIA, so trips on those days are priced higher. Much as Paul's example above may shift travel patterns to an earlier or later trip, in this case they...

I'm amused at how much faith you manage to put into technology. Dan

First off, welcome to the forum. In fairness, this was on you guys. Crosslinx had the same problem - their competing bidder estimated at the time that they were on the hook to lose a billion dollars - and as it turns out, it looks like they were right. A lot of consortia purposely undervalue...

And that's precisely what their "storm service" call does. A lot of expresses get downgraded to locals, and fewer crossovers are used in an effort to minimize service disruptions during the storm. Even operations through the Flyunder are changed to help prevent trains from getting caught in...

A DMU is a locomotive, and is subject to all of the same regulatory requirements of one. Look up "FRA 92 day inspection". Dan

When everything is bespoke, the fewer times you need them to engineer a solution the cheaper it will be. If we could get more cities to build streetcars and subways to our standards, then the costs of buying new rolling stock would go down, and there would be a far greater likelihood of being...

So those rain drops falling from the sky and hitting me in the head at 8.30 were a figment of my imagination then? For the record, the rain had turned to ice pellets at 14th Ave. by 9am and has been alternating between that and snow ever since. We have almost 10cm of snow in front of my office...

That is completely and totally incorrect. The line voltage - 1500Vdc in the case of Ottawa and 750Vdc in Toronto - has no bearing on the onboard traction bus voltage, which is about 480Vac. How is this any different than the 30 foot long stickers that were applied to each platform, exactly? Dan

And yet, there are a not-inconsequential number of stations in Europe that have done just what has been mooted here - separating the high-speed and local/regional rail stations. The one staff member who we talked with at the Open House was quite explicit that it would be no further than 1km...

There is. Dan

First off, the last one was completed a couple of months ago. Second, while they may have been derived from each other they are quite different in the details. The bodies are different, the articulations are different, the motors are different, and the number of motors is different. The input...

This is correct. The MP54s are capable of operating on one or the other of the two prime movers - and in fact, they are designed to alternate between them in order to equalize their operating time - or both together. But as they don't have a separate motor for providing HEP, it thus has to come...