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GO Transit Electrification | Metrolinx

^Our railways do many things that are penny wise and pound foolish, but sometimes the dollars just don’t lie. One has to look at all the costs and investments and ask if the return is there. Limping along with a threadbare operation seems to work quite well... at least, until it doesn’t. The cost of replacing even a few low bridges will buy a lot of diesel fuel, and the carbon loading of all that electrical infrastructure versus the diesel fuel burned, may be much closer on the spreadsheet than we admit.

Much is made of height as the limiting factor for North American electrification, and while that has a convenient argument (which India has clearly debunked!) I’m not sure that’s actually the true impediment.

To my mind, the risk is not in height but in the volume of hazardous material carried and the risk of adding a high voltage spark into that equation. What is the probability of mishaps over say 20 years? And if there is one mishap, what’s the gross end impact in terms of number of settlements paid, average amount per settlement, change in insurer behaviour etc? How much of that is borne by the railway and its shareholders, versus by the state? It would be interesting to know what the risk profiles for the Indian railways are and how the risk aversion of their regulatory and legal environments compare. I suspect the freight railways have thought this through in detail.

I’m not arguing against GO electrification, which should have happened years ago on GO’s own lines....but to ask why electrification is not favoured by our freight railroads, one has to look at all the legal, legislative, liability, and financial changes that would be needed to change their appetite.

- Paul
 
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rbt said:
What do you mean by 5G frequencies? 5G, like LTE before it, will be deployed on everything from 600Mhz (band 71 will be common in Canada) up to ensure full coverage. Lower spectrum with older technologies (like 2G/3G) will be redeployed to newer hardware. Also, 5G (New Radio) can be deployed on spectrum also used by LTE since both use time multiplexing.

It was designed to be capable of being deployed on very high frequencies but it is not restricted to them.
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I'm certainly no techy, but everything I have read says that higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths are necessary for the speed, capacity and lower latency required by fully autonomous vehicles and that those wave characteristics are part of the 5G rollout, and that those characteristics have very limited tower range. It's difficult to find articles that aren't either cheerleaders or predictors of evil in all things 5G. People who can effectively debate this do not include me.
 
lenaitch said:
I'm certainly no techy, but everything I have read says that higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths are necessary for the speed, capacity and lower latency required by fully autonomous vehicles and that those wave characteristics are part of the 5G rollout, and that those characteristics have very limited tower range. It's difficult to find articles that aren't either cheerleaders or predictors of evil in all things 5G. People who can effectively debate this do not include me.
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Bandwidth provides capacity. You can assemble an 40Mhz block at 600Mhz (as Rogers did) or at 2.6Ghz (which everybody got); it's just easier to do at 2.6Ghz because it doesn't "feel" as wide. Taking 40Mhz of 1Ghz is much easier than 40Mhz of 100Mhz. The amount of data you can shove around (speed) is also a function of bandwidth, not frequency.

It's possible for governments to auction off 1Ghz wide blocks in the 20Ghz to 600Ghz range but none have done that. It would be line of sight and outdoors only; even drywall and glass block 20Ghz.


Latency isn't frequency sensitive from a practical perspective for cellular (it is, but there are femtoseconds of difference on a multi millisecond process). Radio protocol changes were made between 3G, 4G, and 5G to decrease latency; those improvements apply at all cellular frequencies.

A 40Mhz chunk of 5G (which Rogers will deploy) will perform just as well in rural areas as their 40Mhz of 5G at 2.6Ghz will in urban areas. Higher spectrum helps with congestion due to large numbers of users so they can better manage sold simultaneous crowds at both Skydome and ACC.


Okay. Now for the self-driving vehicle problem. There are advantages to being able to process the data in a central datacenter rather than on the device; for the same reason that Google Assistant used to run on the central servers rather than on the device. It grants access to massively increased computational capacity.

Realistically, as we've already seen with other products like Google Assistant, they'll use that as a fallback capacity only. So, if the onboard computer doesn't recognize a certain situation (currently it pulls over and asks for human help), it'll send it's situational data to the server and ask if they can provide instruction (before pulling over and asking for human assistance) but it's a backup option for tricky scenarios only. Helpful to reduce pull-over events when available but cannot be relied on 100% to eliminate onboard computational equipment (at very least, telcos do regular maintenance which creates temporary outages).
 
crs1026 said:
Much is made of height as the limiting factor for North American electrification, and while that has a convenient argument (which India has clearly debunked!) I’m not sure that’s actually the true impediment.

To my mind, the risk is not in height but in the volume of hazardous material carried and the risk of adding a high voltage spark into that equation. What is the probability of mishaps over say 20 years? And if there is one mishap, what’s the gross end impact in terms of number of settlements paid, average amount per settlement, change in insurer behaviour etc? How much of that is borne by the railway and its shareholders, versus by the state? It would be interesting to know what the risk profiles for the Indian railways are and how the risk aversion of their regulatory and legal environments compare. I suspect the freight railways have thought this through in detail.

- Paul
Click to expand...

I doubt the analysis really goes that deep; or at rather goes into more detail than these posts. It seems much more like the railroads look at it, see there are potentially issues, and that ALONE is enough for them to decide it's easier to resist all change than even consider further.

To my mind, enabling electrification by passenger operators is one of the major regulatory issues we have with mainline rail, on par with demanding priority scheduling, passenger access to track at all and allowing reasonably design equipment.
 
drum118 said:
Both CN and CP have rejected electrification of their line due to Double stack cars and other things.

Maybe they should setup a test area of many KM to see what issue there maybe and how to fix it or deal with it.
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Which is all the more reason why Metrolinx should have made the decision on single or double level trains BEFORE they put the contract out to tender. This, of course, would have Metrolinx to have made a decision about any thing to do with electrification which it has managed to avoid for a scandalous 5 years.

Now Metrolinx has to battle it out with CN & CP and of course Torontonians could be left with an inferior service due to the way they put out the tender. The tender is only interested in who can provide the service in the most cost effective way as opposed to what's best for the travelling public.
 
crs1026 said:
I’m not arguing against GO electrification, which should have happened years ago on GO’s own lines....but to ask why electrification is not favoured by our freight railroads, one has to look at all the legal, legislative, liability, and financial changes that would be needed to change their appetite.
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10 to 15 years down the road, when hydrogen fuel cell and battery electric technologies in trains mature a bit, I could see either one of these technologies used for GO service on freight-owned corridors, since it would be somewhat of a win-win situation: GO gets low emissions service and the freight operators don't have power lines along their railways.
 
Wm Perkins Bull said:
So by the term "update", I assume that they still haven't made up their minds. How many updates on a single decision can one transit agency make? Seriously, GO RER was announced over 5 years ago and they still haven't even decided what trains or technology they are going to use little alone build any. I know Torontonians are use to iinertia on the transit file but this really is scandalous.
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Couple of quick points.

The Ford Government renamed it GO Expansion from GO RER.

Updates for all RFQs/RFPs are a normal component of Metrolinx board meetings. So it's not a big deal and actually helpful if there's is an update because sometimes months pass between when a RFQ or RFP launches and when I final winner is announced. As discussed previously, there was a January 2020 media article and discussions above about some OnCorr scope changes. Maybe there won't be an update. It's just some speculation. We'll know in a few days.

If you look at what they announced after the Wynne Liberals made the GO electrification commitment in 2014, they said almost right away that the choice of using overhead wires, batteries, or hydrogen was up to the winner of the RFP. They left it up to the consortiums bidding to decide the mix and how best to achieve with rolling stock the broad service levels currently shown on the Metrolinx website. So that clarifies the "decision" aspect. It's more nuanced than you giving the impression Metrolinx can't make a decision. The decision is part of who wins.

It's been long debated here what's better: hydrogen or catenary wires. An argument could be made they should have specified from the beginning, which is a separate argument.
 
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Allandale25 said:
As discussed previously, there was a January 2020 media article and discussions above about some OnCorr scope changes. Maybe there won't be an update. It's just some speculation. We'll know in a few days.
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I'm not sure what an update would contain other than perhaps a note that the additional required EAs continue without interruption.
 
rbt said:
I'm not sure what an update would contain other than perhaps a note that the additional required EAs continue without interruption.
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I agree. It may only be that. I'm just saying in this space-time continuum the meeting is the likely next moment something might be said.
 
Steve Munro has reviewed the latest IO report.

ONCorr Project: GO Network Expansion
This is a very large project including future operation of GO Transit and possible changes in the propulsion technology. An RFQ was issued in March 2018 with an RFP in May 2019. In the Spring 2020 update, the financial closing date changed from “2021” to “2022”.
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Allandale25 said:
Not necessarily agreeing. Just the messenger.
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There are very few low-carbon alternatives for low-frequency VIA routes outside the Corridor.

It's not really suited to high-frequency trains but a few of GO's rush-only services might lean that direction in 2040.
 
rbt said:
There are very few low-carbon alternatives for low-frequency VIA routes outside the Corridor.

It's not really suited to high-frequency trains but a few of GO's rush-only services might lean that direction in 2040.
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IMHO, battery trains are more likely to happen than hydrogen trains.

There's vastly far more than enough power in modern lithium batteries to power a 12-car BiLevel GO train carrying 2000 passengers. The devil is in the details (EMU design, coach design, and/or locomotive design, cost of the whole thing). But with a kilowatt-hour of lithium battery falling to USD$62 in bulk by year 2030, the economics are going to quickly make sense.

160kph Battery Train Technology In GTHA (Electrification Solution for Kitchener Line)

As a longtime armchair GO analyst around here (including my well-known GO article from 2015), I have discovered lots of evidence that Metrolinx is now seriously considering battery trains for Kitchener Line. Summary (For Those Unfamiliar With Battery Trains): Battery trains have arrived in...
urbantoronto.ca urbantoronto.ca
 
And once we have autonomous commuter trains, costs will drop even further and we can run even more service. Is that feasible?
 
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