Danforth Line 2 Scarborough Subway Extension

[Richard White]

Do we actually know if this failure is actually the result of negligence? I think we should be careful before assigning blame in this particular instance.

AoD

Agreed.

As I said before it could have been debris on the track which caused this. The only other option would be a coupler malfunction causing the train car to catapult itself off the tracks.

 

[ARG1]

Meh it could have been an LRT by now. Enjoy the bus.

If we went back even further, we could've extended the subway along the old Rail ROW without needing to build an LRT or dig a 40m deep tunnel (before the ROW had houses plopped onto it).

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Agreed.

As I said before it could have been debris on the track which caused this. The only other option would be a coupler malfunction causing the train car to catapult itself off the tracks.

It could be many things; undetected fatigue failure, foreign objects, etc. There is nothing suggesting negligence.

AoD

 

[MrGoose]

If we went back even further, we could've extended the subway along the old Rail ROW without needing to build an LRT or dig a 40m deep tunnel (before the ROW had houses plopped onto it).

What is/was stopping the government from expropriating the houses along the old ROW

 

[Steve X]

What is/was stopping the government from expropriating the houses along the old ROW

Money. You can’t just conquer those land

 

[mossynukes]

Do we actually know if this failure is actually the result of negligence? I think we should be careful before assigning blame in this particular instance.

AoD

No, and when I speak of the "failure", I am not solely referring to this particular instance, but rather the SRT as a whole, and I am defending Bill Davis' imposition of the SRT. The person I was responding to is implying Davis is to blame for this somehow, and they claim that we should be afraid about the Ontario Line because Doug Ford, like Bill Davis, is a progressive conservative. I find this logic absurd and I am calling them out for it.

 

[JBR]

Agreed.

As I said before it could have been debris on the track which caused this. The only other option would be a coupler malfunction causing the train car to catapult itself off the tracks.

I can say with 99% certainty it was not debris on the tracks.

Also, the couple between those 2 cars never comes apart unless it is in the car house for repairs. Cars 3000/3001 is a single unit that cannot be uncoupled to build up another unit.

 

[Richard White]

I can say with 99% certainty it was not debris on the tracks.

Also, the couple between those 2 cars never comes apart unless it is in the car house for repairs. Cars 3000/3001 is a single unit that cannot be uncoupled to build up another unit.

Ooooo it was car 3000 and 3001.

That makes sense then.

 

[APTA-2048]

I can say with 99% certainty it was not debris on the tracks.

Also, the couple between those 2 cars never comes apart unless it is in the car house for repairs. Cars 3000/3001 is a single unit that cannot be uncoupled to build up another unit.

They can, but I’m not sure of the process. Interestingly set 3024-3025 actually had 3024 swapped out for another car recently.

 

[MrGoose]

Money. You can’t just conquer those land

It surely can't be that expensive to expropriate all the way to McCowan and Ellesmere.
I'm busy now, but I will count the number of houses along/in the ROW.
At 5.5billion outright expropriating all the houses and then building a surface subway to Scarborough Town Center would be cheaper.

 

[smallspy]

Seeing some photos of the derailment, my guess is that the coupling unit became unattached on the third car and lead it to catch the induction rail (or something else) and thus causing the fourth car to jack up and derail. Wear and tear probably cause the coupling unit to detach on the third car.

You can see the coupling unit on a photo on BlogTo:
https://www.blogto.com/city/2023/07/entire-ttc-line-3-out-service-days-derailment/

The coupler got torn out due to the accident that led to the derailment, not the other way around.

While the cause of the derailment was due to the LIM hitting the reaction rail, they don't know just yet what precipitated that contact.

Dan

 

[Richard White]

The coupler got torn out due to the accident that led to the derailment, not the other way around.

While the cause of the derailment was due to the LIM hitting the reaction rail, they don't know just yet what precipitated that contact.

Dan

Thank you for this insight Dan.

Sometimes you surprise me with the information you provide.

I wonder if this car was recently in for maintenance.

 

[JBR]

They can, but I’m not sure of the process. Interestingly set 3024-3025 actually had 3024 swapped out for another car recently.technically but only if the other unit has 1 car being retired. It’s not an easy swap

Technically they can be swapped yes, but only in extreme cases when another unit is being dismantled and refurbished or retired. It is not a normal thing that happens in the yard when building up a train. All other units are still together as they were upon delivery

 

[T3G]

I am away from my computer and I don't have access currently to my most recent photos of 3000-3001.

So enjoy my photos of them back when they were painted in REAL colours.

So glad I photoed the entire fleet before this derailment happened. I just grabbed photos of the last cars I was missing in March.

 

[Sunnyside]

It surely can't be that expensive to expropriate all the way to McCowan and Ellesmere.
I'm busy now, but I will count the number of houses along/in the ROW.
At 5.5billion outright expropriating all the houses and then building a surface subway to Scarborough Town Center would be cheaper.

Oh there’s no denying it’s doable. But imagine this; a contemporary underground subway drums up significant resistance from locals. Surface rail even moreso- we put things underground because of it. Now imagine that you are buying up quite a few peoples homes (at least hundreds of pissed residents) through the centre of various neighbourhoods (thousands of concerned residents) because you want to “reuse” something that no longer exists- it’s an alignment that doesn’t really hit any destinations. This situation your describing is comparable to when people suggest reactivating other abandoned corridors that HAVENT been built over. If people aren’t open to losing a trail in a valley 50m away from them, then how is this remotely as possible?

Since this is a question of land acquisition, you would have to pay effectively market rate for each house. Let’s go with a baseline assumption that today, a typical Scarborough home costs $1 million (if this seems high, just pretend it includes legal fees). 100 homes is $100M. Google earth puts 10 homes in the adjacent subdivision approximately 100m, so your gonna pay roughly $100M/km in property acquisition alone. Housing crash? Okay, $50M/km. That’s still an absolutely massive cost most projects hardly even have to factor at all. At this point, even with a measly cost to build the actual Line at $50m/Km, your total is going to be $100-$150m/km. That might be a bargain compared to what we pay for tunnelling, but if we want to be ultra cost-efficient then elevated is only marginally more expensive and well within the Overton window by comparison.

Point is, this isn’t underground because it was the best option. Money wasn’t even a consideration. We could come up with a million better ways to do this and it wouldn’t have put this extension one metre shallower.