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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

smallspy said:
The major ones that I'd been told about earlier in the year had been moved to September. And have already happened.

That said, Metrolinx's marketing is portraying this London service as a major service expansion. Whether it actually ends up being useful for anyone remains to be seen.

Dan
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That’s too bad. I was hoping for a weekend service announcement on the Kitchener Line after the bridge work in Guelph.
 
What is up with the (lack of) weekday evening service on Lakeshore West? It's odd that GO is going through the trouble of introducing a Union-Exhibition shuttle* rather than running full 30-minute service like they do on weekend evenings.
*According to the combined Lakeshore timetable it is actually a shuttle train, not an extension of Lakeshore East trips.

Service drops off a cliff after the PM peak, falling from 6 trains per hour, down to just 1:
a.jpg

Is there ongoing trackwork west of Mimico which encourages GO to design a schedule which can be run on a single track?


nfitz said:
They fixed the Lakeshore West schedule to show the missing daily Niagara Falls train
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It's not just the daily weekday train, it's also the 4 daily weekend trains, which is great news. It was very annoying that select Lakeshore West train trips were previously missing from the Lakeshore West train timetable.

On weekends it's also useful that they show the Niagara trips since they're the only express trips of the day, and because the last train of the night is actually a Niagara trip.

Second half of the weekend eastbound timetable:
b.jpg


Bordercollie said:
So if you work 9-5 you can take the GO train to Union in the morning and then ride the VIA home.

The GO train leaves kitchener after 5pm so if you live in St Mary's you can now commute to Kitchener by train. Its not designed for London to Toronto passengers anyways since VIA would be faster using the Dundas sub.
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Given that a pick-and-mix of GO and VIA trips does look like it would make sense for some commuters, it would be nice if they could work something out with the bulk discounts for GO and VIA. VIA sells commuter tickets in packs of 20 per month, so if you commute semi-regularly and use a mix of GO and VIA trips you wouldn't meet the threshold for bulk discounts on either GO or VIA individually even though your total number of trips may actually reach their theshold if they'd all been with the same company. In general it would be nicer if one company offered two trips per day, rather than two companies each offering 1 trip per day, one hour apart from eachother.
 
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"London and the Thames were named in 1793 by John Graves Simcoe, who proposed the site for the capital city of Upper Canada. The first European settlement was between 1801 and 1804 by Peter Hagerman.[5] The village was founded in 1826 and incorporated in 1855. Since then, London has grown to be the largest southwestern Ontario municipality and Canada's 11th largest metropolitan area, having annexed many of the smaller communities that surround it." From link.

Now London, Ontario will be a "bedroom suburb" of Toronto, Ontario. Interesting outcome.
 
reaperexpress said:
What is up with the (lack of) weekday evening service on Lakeshore West? It's odd that GO is going through the trouble of introducing a Union-Exhibition shuttle* rather than running full 30-minute service like they do on weekend evenings.
*According to the combined Lakeshore timetable it is actually a shuttle train, not an extension of Lakeshore East trips.

Service drops off a cliff after the PM peak, falling from 6 trains per hour, down to just 1:
View attachment 354092
Is there ongoing trackwork west of Mimico which encourages GO to design a schedule which can be run on a single track?



It's not just the daily weekday train, it's also the 4 daily weekend trains, which is great news. It was very annoying that select Lakeshore West train trips were previously missing from the Lakeshore West train timetable.

On weekends it's also useful that they show the Niagara trips since they're the only express trips of the day, and because the last train of the night is actually a Niagara trip.

Second half of the weekend eastbound timetable:
View attachment 354093


Given that a pick-and-mix of GO and VIA trips does look like it would make sense for some commuters, it would be nice if they could work something out with the bulk discounts for GO and VIA. VIA sells commuter tickets in packs of 20 per month, so if you commute semi-regularly and use a mix of GO and VIA trips you wouldn't meet the threshold for bulk discounts on either GO or VIA individually even though your total number of trips may actually reach their theshold if they'd all been with the same company. In general it would be nicer if one company offered two trips per day, rather than two companies each offering 1 trip per day, one hour apart from eachother.
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I’ve taken the Lakeshore West train a few times lately. Ridership remains very low off peak. The QEW, however, is definitely busy. How do we get people back on the train?
 
W. K. Lis said:
Now London, Ontario will be a "bedroom suburb" of Toronto, Ontario. Interesting outcome.
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How many times do we need to repeat that the GO service will NOT be used by commuters from London to Toronto?
 
PinkLucy said:
I’ve taken the Lakeshore West train a few times lately. Ridership remains very low off peak. The QEW, however, is definitely busy. How do we get people back on the train?
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Stay tuned for gas prices going up.........likely to $1.50 per L, within 2 weeks.

Full return to the office (likely January)

An associated shortage of parking spots.

The mask mandate being dropped; (likely January), as that's the indication for 'return to normal' and will give people greater confidence.
 
PinkLucy said:
I’ve taken the Lakeshore West train a few times lately. Ridership remains very low off peak. The QEW, however, is definitely busy. How do we get people back on the train?
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my experience is that the QEW / Gardiner is still much less busy than normal still, though yea, lots of traffic even with still lower volumes. The Gardiner especially is still much less busy and is nowhere near as congested as it was pre-pandemic. While many more industrial industries have returned to work, downtown based industries (office employment) are still work from home, which means that the Gardiner is proportionately more empty than other highways still.

I expect GO ridership to start to pick up once downtown office workers return.
 
What's up with the large discrepancy between the travel times of the Via Rail train and the Kitchener Go train? The Via Rail train is a good 15 minutes faster for the exact same stops and distance.
Untitled.png
 
Krypto98 said:
What's up with the large discrepancy between the travel times of the Via Rail train and the Kitchener Go train? The Via Rail train is a good 15 minutes faster for the exact same stops and distance.View attachment 354137
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Think about that, the P42 and F40's with 2-3 LRC or HEP cars, or an F59 with 6-8 Bilevel coaches. Which one is heavier? I bet the gearing is not the same either.
 
Krypto98 said:
What's up with the large discrepancy between the travel times of the Via Rail train and the Kitchener Go train? The Via Rail train is a good 15 minutes faster for the exact same stops and distance.
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In practice, VIA trains often take longer to operate this route than scheduled. I imagine GO's schedule is more representative of current operating conditions.
 
E•MO•TION said:
In practice, VIA trains often take longer to operate this route than scheduled. I imagine GO's schedule is more representative of current operating conditions.
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Yeah I generally have far more faith in GO's schedules than VIA's. Beyond just having fewer conflicts with freight trains, I think GO's better on-time performance is also partly because GO is constantly tweaking schedules to reflect actual run times. In contrast, the North Mainline VIA timetable has remained untouched for years despite track upgrades between Kitchener and Georgetown and a considerable increase in GO services east of Kitchener. It's possible that new slow orders have also appeared west of Kitchener since the schedule was written.

While the scheduled VIA travel time between London and Kitchener may be too short, I suspect that the scheduled travel time between Kitchener and Toronto is too long. GO express services run the line in 1h41 making 6 intermediate stops, while VIA schedules 1h35 making 3 or 4 intermediate stops. I would have expected a larger difference between the two given the much lighter VIA consists (typically only 2 or 4 single-deck coaches) and GO's generally more conservative scheduling. VIA also schedules 26 minutes from Kitchener to Guelph while GO schedules only 21.

My guess is that VIA's end-to-end travel time is accurate, but their eastbound departure time from Kitchener should be about 5 minutes later (and westbound departure 5 minutes earlier). That would work out to 1h59 London - Kitchener and 1h30 Kitchener - Toronto, which matches the GO travel times a bit better.

P.S. The GO schedule is a testament to how appalling the tracks currently are west of Kitchener:

Kitchener - Toronto:
103 km in 1h41 (61 km/h avg) - while making 6 intermediate stops (14.7 km spacing)

London - Kitchener
92 km in 2h12 (42 km/h avg) - while making 2 intermediate stops (30.7 km spacing)

It is absolutely disgraceful that the train only averages 42 km/h west of Kitchener. A train service with 31 km stop spacing and a dead straight alignment between stations should average around 80-90 km/h, based on other VIA lines with similar stop spacing.
 
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E•MO•TION said:
In practice, VIA trains often take longer to operate this route than scheduled. I imagine GO's schedule is more representative of current operating conditions.
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Anecdotally I don’t think I’ve ever seen the VIA train arrive at its scheduled 9:44am time in Guelph.
 
reaperexpress said:
Yeah I generally have far more faith in GO's schedules than VIA's. Beyond just having fewer conflicts with freight trains, I think GO's better on-time performance is also partly because GO is constantly tweaking schedules to reflect actual run times. In contrast, the North Mainline VIA timetable has remained untouched for years despite track upgrades between Kitchener and Georgetown and a considerable increase in (conflicting) GO services east of Kitchener. It's possible that new slow orders have also appeared west of Kitchener since the schedule was written.

While the scheduled VIA travel time between London and Kitchener may be too short, I suspect that the scheduled travel time between Kitchener and Toronto is too long. GO express services run the line in 1h41 making 6 intermediate stops, while VIA schedules 1h35 making 3 or 4 intermediate stops. I would have expected a larger difference between the two given the much lighter VIA consists (typically only 2 or 4 single-deck coaches) and GO's generally more conservative scheduling. VIA also schedules 26 minutes from Kitchener to Guelph while GO schedules only 21.

My guess is that VIA's end-to-end travel time is accurate, but their eastbound departure time from Kitchener should be about 5 minutes later (and westbound departure 5 minutes earlier). That would work out to 1h59 London - Kitchener and 1h30 Kitchener - Toronto, which matches the GO travel times a bit better.

P.S. The GO schedule is a testament to how appalling the tracks currently are west of Kitchener:

Kitchener - Toronto:
103 km in 1h41 (61 km/h avg) - while making 6 intermediate stops (14.7 km spacing)

London - Kitchener
92 km in 2h12 (42 km/h avg) - while making 2 intermediate stops (30.7 km spacing)

It is absolutely disgraceful that the train only averages 42 km/h west of Kitchener. A train service with 31 km stop spacing and a dead straight alignment between stations should average around 80-90 km/h, based on other VIA lines with similar stop spacing.
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I'm sure that a tie replacement program and some new sleepers would help. Probably 100K would go a long way to increasing speeds
 
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