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General railway discussions

Bordercollie said:
Hamilton to get $75M shipping container hub, boosting trade and cutting local truck traffic https://share.google/IIh774LU3Z6f7edqK
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This doesn't sound like a "proper" container port, since the containers will be transported to Hamilton by rail. The main benefit would be reduced drayage traffic to and from CP and CN's huge yards through the most congested parts of the QEW/401/403 (and will probably be more convenient for importers in the Niagara region and Southwestern Ontario vs. drayage from Brampton or Vaughan). This is not surprising seeing how pretty much even the smallest container ships are too small for the Seaway these days (AFAIK there was at one point a bit of container traffic on the great lakes but this was mostly gone by the mid 80s).
 
With CN going ahead with construction on their Milton container yard, I'm not sure if there really is a need for a container port in Hamilton.

Probably a container yard for trucks. Like the one in Etobicoke, just north of Sherway Gardens. A yard to store empty containers.
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But for ships? I don't think so. Although hope to be proven wrong.
 
Bojaxs said:
With CN going ahead with construction on their Milton container yard, I'm not sure if there really is a need for a container port in Hamilton.

Probably a container yard for trucks. Like the one in Etobicoke, just north of Sherway Gardens. A yard to store empty containers.
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But for ships? I don't think so. Although hope to be proven wrong.
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My thinking would be to relieve the ports of Halifax and Montreal, but you would need a Seawaymax ship to do it.
 
Apologies. I mis-read the link as 'port' not 'hub'. It is clear in the link the proposal has nothing to do with a land-marine interface.

The containers will still come through a first-port-of-arrival, including Prince Rupert, Vancouver, Saint John, Halifax or Montreal, where it is screened by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

From there, it will be shipped by rail to Hamilton, and held until the company comes to pick it up.
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There's an inventory of railway crossings maintained by Transport Canada, ranked by collision risk. I mapped the entire dataset, which was last published in 2021. So it is a bit out of date, including abandoned/removed crossings on OBRY and BCRY, and including newly grade-separated crossings at Mississauga Road in Brampton or John Counter Road in Kingston.

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Mapping Canada’s railway crossings

There are over 25,000 railway crossings in Canada, ranging from disused rail spurs to busy urban hazards. A Transport Canada list ranks them all by risk, included here in an interactive map.
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ShonTron said:
There's an inventory of railway crossings maintained by Transport Canada, ranked by collision risk. I mapped the entire dataset, which was last published in 2021. So it is a bit out of date, including abandoned/removed crossings on OBRY and BCRY, and including newly grade-separated crossings at Mississauga Road in Brampton or John Counter Road in Kingston.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I poked at some of the data for crossings that are near and dear to this user (as a part-time whistle blower, in the literal meaning), and found the data on train and auto counts quite out of date.

The counts were accurate for one unprotected crossing that I'm aware of which received recent complaints to the municipality and triggered a traffic count... but in the absence of squeaky wheels, the data for other crossings on the same rail line were quite different The result doesn't strike me as particularly thorough or compelling. Maybe the "top 20" are correct, but even when the ranking is down around 1,000 one certainly sees near misses frequently.

I wonder how accurate and up to date the data on incidents and fatalities is. If those stats factor into the risk calculation, there is a certain element of closing the barn door afterwards. There is no mention of sightlines which is a major concern in some locations.

Bottom line: the squeaky wheel may be louder than the whistle.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
Interesting. I poked at some of the data for crossings that are near and dear to this user (as a part-time whistle blower, in the literal meaning), and found the data on train and auto counts quite out of date.

The counts were accurate for one unprotected crossing that I'm aware of which received recent complaints to the municipality and triggered a traffic count... but in the absence of squeaky wheels, the data for other crossings on the same rail line were quite different The result doesn't strike me as particularly thorough or compelling. Maybe the "top 20" are correct, but even when the ranking is down around 1,000 one certainly sees near misses frequently.

I wonder how accurate and up to date the data on incidents and fatalities is. If those stats factor into the risk calculation, there is a certain element of closing the barn door afterwards. There is no mention of sightlines which is a major concern in some locations.

Bottom line: the squeaky wheel may be louder than the whistle.

- Paul
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As I mentioned, the Melbourne Road crossing’s rank dropped by a very large margin despite no changes visible. It’s quite out of date but still interesting.
 
Outside of Canada and the U.S. I’ve been seeing that locomotives last longer in many other countries like Germany, Poland, Australia, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa ones. Could it be that they lack the U.S. throwaway culture? For Poland, they’re in a good position because of the EU after the failed Shock Therapy policies that affected Poland in the 1990s or in Mexico where they’re in a good position because of NAFTA later USMCA. Ukraine and Belarus have higher rates of Corruption hence they couldn’t get newer locomotives like 25-20 years ago.
 
CMQSD402F9011 said:
Outside of Canada and the U.S. I’ve been seeing that locomotives last longer in many other countries like Germany, Poland, Australia, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa ones. Could it be that they lack the U.S. throwaway culture? For Poland, they’re in a good position because of the EU after the failed Shock Therapy policies that affected Poland in the 1990s or in Mexico where they’re in a good position because of NAFTA later USMCA. Ukraine and Belarus have higher rates of Corruption hence they couldn’t get newer locomotives like 25-20 years ago.
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If what you are saying is true (and knowing that sounds super nerdy), there could be all sorts of reasons. Economy, safety culture, wear and tear, and on and on. As we know with autos, a higher reliance of tech can complicate maintenance.

North American freight locos haul a lot more tonnage than in most other parts of the world. At some point, the curve of the cost of maintaining a piece of equipment crosses the cost of replacing it.
 
CMQSD402F9011 said:
Outside of Canada and the U.S. I’ve been seeing that locomotives last longer in many other countries like Germany, Poland, Australia, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa ones. Could it be that they lack the U.S. throwaway culture? For Poland, they’re in a good position because of the EU after the failed Shock Therapy policies that affected Poland in the 1990s or in Mexico where they’re in a good position because of NAFTA later USMCA. Ukraine and Belarus have higher rates of Corruption hence they couldn’t get newer locomotives like 25-20 years ago.
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My father used to say that the TEE brought over here from Europe were junk. They could not handle our climate. My extrapolation from that is that our climate is much harsher and we tend to have bigger trains. We really only need to look at the Siemens sets that Via are running to see how they cannot take our climate. This is not to say that Europe does not see snow. It just seems that we know how to keep engines running through it better.
 
These kinds of uninformed and dataless trackside speculations are really pointless.

Every railway in the world has access to spreadsheet technology. There is no one formula or universal reality that makes railroads do what they do. Well, possibly except differences in access to capital - and that requires convincing decisionmakers who again have very different agendas based on that nation's realities.

For example, it is absurd to suggest that the North American industry, which is about the most relentlessly profit seeking railway environment anywhere, has a "throwaway culture". The facts would likely point to enormous investment in rebuilding old locomotives, often well beyond their OEM state, instead of buying new..

Vive la difference, is all I can offer.

- Paul.
 
lenaitch said:
If what you are saying is true (and knowing that sounds super nerdy), there could be all sorts of reasons. Economy, safety culture, wear and tear, and on and on. As we know with autos, a higher reliance of tech can complicate maintenance.

North American freight locos haul a lot more tonnage than in most other parts of the world. At some point, the curve of the cost of maintaining a piece of equipment crosses the cost of replacing it.
Click to expand...
Wouldn’t deferred maintenance be one thing. Then wouldn’t China and Russia have railways that are close to NA standards? And in Poland, they still run 76 M62s or ST44s on PKP Cargo which were recently modernized with new engines. Unfortunately from Russia.
 
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