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In London they don't have the excuse of possibly passing off the costs to a future HFR project because they're rebuilding the platforms anyway as we speak. London's platforms are on sidings never used by freight trains, so they'd be a particularly easy place to build high-level platforms. I...

No we won't see these on GO routes because they don't have enough door capacity for regional service and they don't have the right floor height for GO's plamned level boarding plarforms. A regional DMU/EMU such as the Stadler FLIRT would make more sense

Spotted at Ottawa Station. In my opinion this is the best-looking train in service in North America.

Sorry but if you consider it "obsessive" to look for solutions for the single largest issue that is within Via's direct control, and you are "still not sure what the problem is" with Via's boarding procedure is then this discussion is pointless.

Indeed, and these two paradigms are often perceived as mutually exclusive, which they are not. Currently they try to babysit every single passenger, which is ridiculously labour-intensive and time-consuming for staff and passengers alike (hence the frustration among passengers). The obvious...

Why do you want to cherry-pick "intercity rail"? Whether or not a train is regional or intercity is a fairly arbitrary distinction. For example the Port Jervis line pictured is 140 km long. People have to climb the same number of steps whether it's a "regional" train or an "intercity" train so...

Off the top of my head? Amtrak, Exo, MBTA, CT Rail, Metro North, NJ Transit, SEPTA, MARC... Pretty much every passenger railway in eastern North America. Amtrak Empire Corridor in Albany, NY Amtrak Empire Corridor in Amsterdam, NY Exo 13 Mont-Saint-Hilaire at Gare Centrale Exo 13...

That doesn't surprise me at all. On the contrary it helps explain why Via seems to copy the inefficient operating practices of airlines rather than looking to basically every other railway in the world

Yes of course when there is a particular opportunity to build things cheaper we should do that, but that's not the case in most of these examples. The main reason we'd be able to build cheaper is when other work is happening anyway. For example it is very good that they built catenary pole...

Yeah it's pretty difficult to swallow these self-congratulatory posts about completing infrastructure while the infrastructure in question is still completely unusable. Kennedy has a second platform but it is unreachable because they haven't built a crossover south of the station. Milliken has...

It helps avoid the situation we have in Toronto where many drivers think that pedestrians only have priority at pedestrian crossovers when the lights are flashing. But the flashing lights have nothing to do with priority assignment - pedestrians have the right of way at pedestrian crossovers...

I think that adding lines that GO doesn't use would undermine the purpose of this map, which is to show the ownership of the railway lines that GO uses. The stations already give plenty of geographical information about where the ownership changes. For a general lay of the land, what you want...

Yeah I think it's safe to assume that some agreement has been signed with CN regarding future GO service levels otherwise they wouldn't have proceeded with the upgrades west of Bramalea

While Metrolinx is definitely too secretive, especially when it comes to imminent service changes, this is the one case where I think that secrecy is warranted. Revealing details of their plans to the public is sort of like making promises, which could undermine their negotiations with private...

I suspect you're right and they made sure to secure agreements before the companies separated. It would definitely be a much bigger challenge with CN which has been separate from the government for decades already, but it does at least demonstrate that it is theoretically possible for a freight...

Okay... but what does that have to do with this discussion? Nobody here is claiming that Brightline was built without government expenditure. We are debating whether it is possible for a passenger train operating company to make an arrangement with a freight railway that enables them to...

Brightline was indeed created by Florida East Coast Industries (FECI), the parent company of the Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) but in 2017 the FECR was sold to GrupoMexico so it is no longer part of the same company as Brightline. CN also got billions of dollars in public funds to upgrade...

Like you said, it depends on how much ridership potential and dispatching flexibility the line has. If the line is fairly slow (not attracting much demand) and it's built as a single-tracked line then there won't be much possibility for competition since the schedule would be limited to a...

The Government of Canada pays CN to upgrade a lot of their lines on behalf of Via. For example, all of the triple-tracked segments on the Kingston sub were paid for in Via's name. The fact that Brightline and FEC were able to create an agreement to balance dispatch priorities on the rails owned...

Brightline