Toronto Union Pearson Express | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx | MMM Group Limited

[north-of-anything]

They keep adding stops to the line. May as well convert it to a subway. Make it an airport branch for the Ontario line.

This prospect intrigues me, but I can't really fathom how they can connect the UPX and Ontario Line, or where that connection would go.

Would it be an extension north from Exhibition up Dufferin or Roncesvalles? Or another tunnel emerging from west of King-Bathurst?

 

[Bojaxs]

This prospect intrigues me, but I can't really fathom how they can connect the UPX and Ontario Line, or where that connection would go.

Would it be an extension north from Exhibition up Dufferin or Roncesvalles? Or another tunnel emerging from west of King-Bathurst?

That was my thinking. I posted this in the "fantasy thread." I messed up the colours, it should be dark blue from Roncesvalles to Mt. Dennis. Once it reaches the future Woodbine station, run it above ground, parallel with the Kitchener line and have it use the existing UPX tracks leading up to Pearson.

Running automated trains to & from Pearson would make a lot of staff available to run the GO trains. I often feel like the UPX uses up too much of GO's labour/staff than it really requires. Unfortunately, federal regulations require two staff members at the front of every train. Even if those trains are small, DMU's.

 

[reaperexpress]

This prospect intrigues me, but I can't really fathom how they can connect the UPX and Ontario Line, or where that connection would go.

Would it be an extension north from Exhibition up Dufferin or Roncesvalles? Or another tunnel emerging from west of King-Bathurst?

There are many ways to connect the Ontario Line to the UPX tracks. In addition to the extremely expensive option shown by Bojax, here's a slightly cheaper option that makes a beeline from Exhibition to the rail corridor, that I previously posted here:

And here's a different alignment I posted in the Union Station Expansion thread a while ago which would probably be even cheaper than the one shown above since it avoids the need for the tunnel from Exhibition to Queen & Dufferin. This would free up a lot of capacity at Union Station (which could potentially be used to bring Alto into the station)

The Ontario Line Extension thread has track diagrams all the way to Pearson.

 

[Bojaxs]

There are many ways to connect the Ontario Line to the UPX tracks. In addition to the extremely expensive option shown by Bojax, here's a slightly cheaper option that makes a beeline from Exhibition to the rail corridor, that I previously posted here:

And here's a different alignment I posted in the Union Station Expansion thread a while ago which would probably be even cheaper than the one shown above since it avoids the need for the tunnel from Exhibition to Queen & Dufferin. This would free up a lot of capacity at Union Station (which could potentially be used to bring Alto into the station)

The Ontario Line Extension thread has track diagrams all the way to Pearson.

Hey man! I'm all for your suggestion! I was merely showing how one could possibly extend the Ontario line from Exhibition to Pearson airport. I'm definitely onboard with what you suggested in the ALTO thread. Build it!

Does this mean we can scrap the GO "Smart Track" stations proposed along the Kitchener line? Build Ontario Line stations for St. Clair and Liberty Village rather than GO stations? A heavy rail, commuter train should not have to endure metro style, stop spacing.

 

[reaperexpress]

Hey man! I'm all for your suggestion! I was merely showing how one could possibly extend the Ontario line from Exhibition to Pearson airport. I'm definitely onboard with what you suggested in the ALTO thread. Build it!

I have nothing against your suggestion either, I'm just putting some other possible alignments out there with different advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately neither of us has enough information to make a final decision on rapid transit alignments.

Does this mean we can scrap the GO "Smart Track" stations proposed along the Kitchener line? Build an Ontario Line station for St. Clair and Liberty Village rather than a GO station?

I guess it depends what you mean by "scrap". The stations would be built pretty much as they're currently designed, the only difference would be that the western pair of tracks would be used by the Ontario Line instead of the UP Express. So the platforms would be a slightly different height and length (possibly with platform screen doors), and signalling & electrification would be different. Those stations are not currently planned to be served by GO Transit anyway, so that's not actually a change.

Rendering of St Clair - Old Weston station by Metrolinx, note that only the UP Express has platforms. GO trains pass by on the tracks to the left of the station.

 

[Bojaxs]

I guess it depends what you mean by "scrap". The stations would be pretty much the same as currently designed, the only difference would be that the western pair of tracks is used by the Ontario Line instead of the UP Express. So the platforms would be a slightly different height and length (possibly with platform screen doors), and signalling & electrification would be different. Those stations would not be served by GO Transit, but that's already the plan anyway.

Rendering of St Clair - Old Weston station by Metrolinx, note that only the UP Express has platforms. GO trains pass by on the tracks to the left of the station.

My only concern with this proposal is it can hinder any future widening of the GO corridor. One of the biggest complaints with the Ontario Line setup at East Harbour. This GO corridor could see Kitchener & Milton line (depending on negotiations with CPKC) service increases, along with a future Bolton line. Is there enough tracks running through here to accommodate all of this?

In your post in the ALTO thread, I got the impression that you wanted this line to be majority underground until it got relatively close to the existing UPX tracks near Pearson.

 

[Steve X]

I think it would be more useful if the line pass through Roncesvalles/Queen, a station around Roncesvalles and High Park Blvd connecting to the 506 and connect to Line 2 + GO/UPX at Dundas West/Bloor Station.

If the line is to continue north, it'll be difficult to use the rail corridor as there isn't enough space for another pair of tracks. It would be expensive to tunnel but if they do, they should build a station at the Junction (Keele/Dundas) then turn north to the Stockyards (Keele/St Clair). Continuing north to Mount Dennis is a option but Rogers Rd/Weston Rd isn't exactly a transit connection area. It is better to turn west and head towards St Clair/Runnymede for a station than north.

Instead of Mount Dennis Station, I would connect this to the GO/UPX at Weston Station. After Runnymede/St Clair, I would place a station at Jane/Alliance then connect to Line 5 at Jane/Eglinton, then Jane/Weston, Jane/Trethewey, Jane/Lawrence and west to Weston GO. Of course you can turn this into a Jane rapid transit line by just having it go up on Jane.

 

[Bojaxs]

I think it would be more useful if the line pass through Roncesvalles/Queen, a station around Roncesvalles and High Park Blvd connecting to the 506 and connect to Line 2 + GO/UPX at Dundas West/Bloor Station.

If the line is to continue north, it'll be difficult to use the rail corridor as there isn't enough space for another pair of tracks. It would be expensive to tunnel but if they do, they should build a station at the Junction (Keele/Dundas) then turn north to the Stockyards (Keele/St Clair). Continuing north to Mount Dennis is a option but Rogers Rd/Weston Rd isn't exactly a transit connection area. It is better to turn west and head towards St Clair/Runnymede for a station than north.

Instead of Mount Dennis Station, I would connect this to the GO/UPX at Weston Station. After Runnymede/St Clair, I would place a station at Jane/Alliance then connect to Line 5 at Jane/Eglinton, then Jane/Weston, Jane/Trethewey, Jane/Lawrence and west to Weston GO. Of course you can turn this into a Jane rapid transit line by just having it go up on Jane.

You could split off the Ontario line in two directions west of Exhibition. One branch to the airport as @reaperexpress posted & another branch to Mimico. Build a station at Roncesvalles & Park lawn on the Mimico branch. Kind of what I suggested in my earlier posting. Except I prefer Reaper's suggestion to the airport.

 

[reaperexpress]

My only concern with this proposal is it can hinder any future widening of the GO corridor. One of the biggest complaints with the Ontario Line setup at East Harbour.

In your post in the ALTO thread, I got the impression that you wanted this line to be majority underground until it got relatively close to the existing UPX tracks near Pearson.

No, in that thread I was only suggesting underground from Exhibition to just south of Dundas West. From Dundas West to Pearson Junction it would use 2 of the 4 existing Metrolinx tracks while GO/Via would use the other two.

If the line is to continue north, it'll be difficult to use the rail corridor as there isn't enough space for another pair of tracks. It would be expensive to tunnel but if they do, they should build a station at the Junction (Keele/Dundas) then turn north to the Stockyards (Keele/St Clair). Continuing north to Mount Dennis is a option but Rogers Rd/Weston Rd isn't exactly a transit connection area. It is better to turn west and head towards St Clair/Runnymede for a station than north.

Instead of Mount Dennis Station, I would connect this to the GO/UPX at Weston Station. After Runnymede/St Clair, I would place a station at Jane/Alliance then connect to Line 5 at Jane/Eglinton, then Jane/Weston, Jane/Trethewey, Jane/Lawrence and west to Weston GO. Of course you can turn this into a Jane rapid transit line by just having it go up on Jane.

You don't need any space for additional tracks. A double-tracked mainline railway with ETCS has an extremely high capacity as long as its trains have a similar average speed, easily 12 trains per hour, potentially up to 20. Even in the most ambitious scenario with HSR every 30 minutes I'm still struggling to think of 12 mainline trains per hour that we would run on the line in addition to the subway.

With a metro service every 3 minutes plus mainline trains every 5 minutes, that corridor would have a massive capacity already, so I don't see any world in which we ever need to widen it again. And that's not even the maximum frequency for either of them.

If we do somehow need more capacity to the west it's more likely we'd widen the Milton line or Lakeshore West line rather than widenin the Kitchener line again.

Service Type	Frequency peak hour	Capacity per train	Total capacity per direction
Ontario Line	30 trains/h	800 p/train (5-car metro)	22,500 p/h
GO Kitchener Line	10 trains/h	1200 p/train (8-car bilevel)	12,000 p/h
Alto/Via intercity	2 trains/h	400 p/train (7-car intercity)	800 p/h
TOTAL	42 trains/h	-	35,300 p/h

 

[Bojaxs]

No, in that thread I was only suggesting underground from Exhibition to just south of Dundas West. From Dundas West to Pearson Junction it would use 2 of the 4 existing tracks while GO/Via would use the other two.


You don't need any space for additional tracks - the railway is wide enough already. A double-tracked mainline railway with ETCS has an extremely high capacity as long as its trains have a similar average speed, easily 12 trains per hour, potentially up to 20. I highly doubt we'd be running more than 12 trains per hour to Brampton. Even in the most ambitious scenario with HSR every 30 minutes I'm still struggling to think of 12 mainline trains per hour that we would run on the line in addition to the subway.
View attachment 708256

With a metro service every 3 minutes plus mainline trains every 5 minutes, that corridor would have a massive capacity already, so I don't see any world in which we ever need to widen it again. And that's not even the maximum frequency for either of them.

If we do somehow need more capacity to the west it's more likely we'd widen the Milton line or Lakeshore West line rather than widenin the Kitchener line again.

Service Type	Frequency peak hour	Capacity per train	Total capacity per direction
Ontario Line	20 trains/h	1000 p/train (6-car metro)	20,000 p/h
GO Kitchener Line	10 trains/h	1200 p/train (8-car bilevel)	12,000 p/h
Alto/Via intercity	2 trains/h	400 p/train (7-car intercity)	800 p/h
TOTAL	42 trains/h	-	32,800 p/h

Okay, now you've lost me on your proposal. I would never support sacrificing GO tracks for a subway, and I'm a very pro-subway guy. You're basically hedging all your bets on GO adopting ETCS. I wouldn't count on this.

I like you're idea of extending the Ontario Line parallel with the Kitchener line up to the airport, but I don't support converting existing GO tracks to Ontario line.

 

[reaperexpress]

Okay, now you've lost me on your proposal. I would never support sacrificing GO tracks for a subway, and I'm a very pro-subway guy.

I'm not sacrificing any GO tracks. The current plan is 2 tracks for an airport local service, and 2 tracks for GO express services. My proposal is 2 tracks for an airport local service and 2 tracks for GO express services. That is exactly the same number of tracks for the GO express services, the only change is that the local service would use metro trains with faster acceleration, shorter dwell times, lower operating costs and higher frequency, and it would head to Osgoode instead of Union.

You're basically hedging all your bets on GO adopting ETCS. I wouldn't count on this.

No I'm not hedging anything on the signalling. The line already carries 8 trains per hour on a single track per direction TODAY, before any signalling upgrades.

This is the current (November 2025) timetable, and all these trains are on the same track between Mount Dennis and Union due to construction:

And this is definitely not the max capacity of the line, because it has closer block spacing (higher capacity) than Lakeshore East which currently runs 9 trains per hour in the peak hour on a single track. So the existing capacity with the existing signalling along the Weston subdivision is at least 10 trains per hour on a single pair of tracks.

Adding a subway in addition to that is a gargantuan increase in capacity - much larger than the current plan which is to use the two additional tracks to run the UP Express as a local service every 8 minutes.

Even if I were hedging on the signalling, how could it possibly make sense to spend tens of billions of dollars tunnelling under the railway just to avoid upgrading the signalling to meet industry standards?

I like you're idea of extending the Ontario Line parallel with the Kitchener line up to the airport, but I don't support converting existing GO tracks to Ontario line.

The whole point of going along the railway is that it allows local train services to be diverted into the Ontario Line tunnel at a minimal cost, freeing up capacity at Union, reducing travel times for local services and increasing local train frequency. If we need to spend tens of billions of dollars to tunnel under an existing railway that's already owned by the Province, none of those things will ever happen.

 

[urbanclient]

No, in that thread I was only suggesting underground from Exhibition to just south of Dundas West. From Dundas West to Pearson Junction it would use 2 of the 4 existing Metrolinx tracks while GO/Via would use the other two.

You don't need any space for additional tracks. A double-tracked mainline railway with ETCS has an extremely high capacity as long as its trains have a similar average speed, easily 12 trains per hour, potentially up to 20. Even in the most ambitious scenario with HSR every 30 minutes I'm still struggling to think of 12 mainline trains per hour that we would run on the line in addition to the subway.
View attachment 708257

With a metro service every 3 minutes plus mainline trains every 5 minutes, that corridor would have a massive capacity already, so I don't see any world in which we ever need to widen it again. And that's not even the maximum frequency for either of them.

If we do somehow need more capacity to the west it's more likely we'd widen the Milton line or Lakeshore West line rather than widenin the Kitchener line again.

Service Type	Frequency peak hour	Capacity per train	Total capacity per direction
Ontario Line	20 trains/h	1000 p/train (6-car metro)	20,000 p/h
GO Kitchener Line	10 trains/h	1200 p/train (8-car bilevel)	12,000 p/h
Alto/Via intercity	2 trains/h	400 p/train (7-car intercity)	800 p/h
TOTAL	42 trains/h	-	32,800 p/h

Can I just nitpick a bit here? Great posts as always. The capacity for 100 metre long, 3 metre wide trains seems very realistic, if not conservative, but I don't see 6-car trains happening anytime soon, if ever. It would mean lengthening the platforms to 120 metres. The Ontario Line platforms AFAIK are 100 metres long with trains initially being 4-car / 80 metres long.

 

[crs1026]

It's great fun as a thought exercise to imagine all these options and permutations. But my more direct concern is how the design of the Kitchener corridor seems to be sliding sideways.

We don't know the ridership currently or in projection, but the plan to date has been to grow the corridor with two roles - one being an express regional service linking Brampton and beyond to central GTA, and the second being an inside-GTA heavy rail corridor that may hint at subway performance but may have a bit more conservative stop spacing and peak headways. Deciding to terminate the inner-GTA line at Pearson seems to be abandoning the connectivity between Mount Pleasant, Brampton/Bramalea and Malton and the City stops - Weston, Mount Dennis, St Clair and Bloor (and perhaps Liberty). Are we happy with that? What level of ridership would that impact if the Halton/Peel riders had to change trains to reach any of those stops? This feels to me like abandoning part of the plan rather than improving it.

The existing Weston Sub has been built with a great deal of capacity, thanks to the most intensive conventional block signalling of any GO line. The obvious point being, we can leverage that signalling to run a great many trains on close headways. Deciding that we have to enhance further to get subway level headways and capacity risks throwing that investment away, and may be 20 years away from being needed.

To my mind, any attempt to rethink the corridor from its design of 5-10 years ago is a bad thing - typical Toronto transit planning where we constantly reinvent, wasting effort and delaying execution because we aim, aim, aim.....

Metrolinx likely accepted the commitment to add Smarttrack stations with great reluctance, and apparently felt safe walking back that commitment by shift the St Clair stop to UP. That is enough scope creep in itself, and we should not be letting that decision let things slide further into a general revisioning of the corridor. Adding in a debate of where OL should go next, if at all, is a huge step sideways.

Again, if you don't have a firm destination in mind, any road will get you there.

Let's get EMU's to Mount Pleasant, interleaved with Electric UP to Pearson, using the headways that are possible with existing infrastructure. And let's get hourly or better 2WAD to Kitchener. And extend some of those Kitchener runs to London on an improved Kitchener-London line. Extend the Line 6 from Humber through Woodbine to Pearson as the transfer for those trains from beyond. Let our grandchildren take it from there.

- Paul

 

[reaperexpress]

Can I just nitpick a bit here? Great posts as always. The capacity for 100 metre long, 3 metre wide trains seems very realistic, if not conservative, but I don't see 6-car trains happening anytime soon, if ever. It would mean lengthening the platforms to 120 metres. The Ontario Line platforms AFAIK are 100 metres long with trains initially being 4-car / 80 metres long.

Oh I was thinking it had been increased from 5 to 6 - I must have confused that with when it was increased from 4 to 5. Thanks for the correction.

The Hitachi brochure says the trains could provide a capacity of 30 000 per hour with a headway of 90 s, which is 750/train but I'm not sure if that's referring to the initial 4-car train or the final 5-car train. I've conservatively assumed a capacity of 22,500 per hour in the (updated) table.

 

[urbanclient]

Oh I was thinking it had been increased from 5 to 6 - I must have confused that with when it was increased from 4 to 5. Thanks for the correction.

The Hitachi brochure says the trains could provide a capacity of 30 000 per hour with a headway of 90 s, which is 750/train but I'm not sure if that's referring to the initial 4-car train or the final 5-car train. I've conservatively assumed a capacity of 22,500 per hour in the (updated) table.

This is a decent guide for AW3 (6 pax/sq metre) crush loads for metro rolling stock: https://www.checkerboardhill.com/2022/04/metro-train-carbody-standards-of-china/. Even a 4 car train should be able to carry 960 at crush loads, factor in the transverse-y layout expected for the Ontario Line and a more comfortable load condition, 750 seems about right for a 4 car, 80 m Line 3 train and certainly doable for a 5 car train.