GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

[ssiguy2]

Thanks for the info.

I'm kind of surprised by that. The GO Kitchener station is basically useless to Cambridge even with the eventual LRT connection and is a very direct route from Milton.

Brantford/Paris has about 130,000 any while not many Toronto commuters there are a lot going to Hamilton and MacU. Also Paris is a bit of a tourist town. VIA is an option but the service is pretty bad and useless for daily commuter to Toronto or Hamilton. I think Niagara is a natural but not Peterborough..........I think it's too far and remote.

How far does Lakeshore go? Any planes for extensions to Port Hope/Coburg?

 

[salsa]

How far does Lakeshore go? Any planes for extensions to Port Hope/Coburg?

Also, what's going on with the proposed Bowmanville extension?

 

[innsertnamehere]

Port hope cobourg won't happen, but bowmanville will probably happen as a part of RER, Metrolinx will want the realigned part in Oshawa done and it's nothing after that to bring it to Bowmanville.

There has been some effort on Cambridge from the municipality, but in order to extend it CP wants an additional track for the entire distance IIRC. This drives costs up to the point that it isn't really worth the cost.

 

[Jonny5]

Thanks for the info.

I'm kind of surprised by that. The GO Kitchener station is basically useless to Cambridge even with the eventual LRT connection and is a very direct route from Milton.

Brantford/Paris has about 130,000 any while not many Toronto commuters there are a lot going to Hamilton and MacU. Also Paris is a bit of a tourist town. VIA is an option but the service is pretty bad and useless for daily commuter to Toronto or Hamilton. I think Niagara is a natural but not Peterborough..........I think it's too far and remote.

Brantford and Paris would take quite a circuitous route to get to Hamilton by rail. You would turn a 20 to 30 minute drive into a 2hour trip with multiple connections since the tracks don't go near Mc!aster. Also, and correct me if I'm wrong, but even calling Paris "a bit of a tourist town" sounds like an exxageration.

 

[crs1026]

The old TH+B line from Brantford to Hamilton has been mentioned here before as a potential solution to passenger rail, partly because it solves the "How to connect Hamilton to Brantford London and Windsor" question for intercity rail, and partly because it passes through the main population/business zones of Dundas/Hamilton more expeditiously than the CN line which follows the north side of the valley. Personally I suspect this is just a fantasy idea, as the surrounding neighbourhoods have long since forgotten that there was ever a rail line there. IIRC when the Barrie line was reactivated from Bradford north to Barrie, the per-mile price was quite high. The same would be true here, and the NIMBY factor would be larger.

The same could be said for the old Barrie-Orillia line, the rest of the Uxbridge Sub to Lindsay...."lines that got away". You can theorise that a rail line would be viable given the current auto traffic, but it's probably not possible to reactivate the line, and the travelling time would not be competitive even to gridlocked highways.

South Kitchener and North Cambridge is a zone where there are plenty of commuters who head for the 401 each day. The challenge is that their destination may not be directly reachable by rail...a rail connection to downtown Toronto doesn't help them. You can build the commuter line as a "they will come" proposition, or you can try bus service which is more flexible in routing. Considering the number of GO busses I'm seeing on the 401 west of Milton, that solution may actually be working.

- Paul

 

[ShonTron]

Barrie has reconfigured the road system near its waterfront with the removal of the Newmarket Sub north of Allandale. Its plans for redevelopment don't jive with bringing rail back, and a short section of the ROW near the Barrie/Oro-Medonte boundary has been built upon. The rest of the route is a great cycling trail.

The old TH&B route between Hamilton and Brantford is also preserved almost entirely as a rail trail. It was recently improved and extended in Hamilton towards its downtown. The Uxbridge Sub is similarly preserved almost in its entirety as a rail trail to Lindsay from Uxbridge. I've done it twice.

If GO service was ever extended to Brantford (it shouldn't), there should be a station at Dundas. It's far from Dundas' downtown and McMaster, but it at least was the old location of the CN/VIA station before VIA consolidated its Hamilton stop at Aldershot (it used the old CN station, Dundas, and the old Burlington station).

 

[Jonny5]

Barrie has reconfigured the road system near its waterfront with the removal of the Newmarket Sub north of Allandale. Its plans for redevelopment don't jive with bringing rail back, and a short section of the ROW near the Barrie/Oro-Medonte boundary has been built upon. The rest of the route is a great cycling trail.

The old TH&B route between Hamilton and Brantford is also preserved almost entirely as a rail trail. It was recently improved and extended in Hamilton towards its downtown. The Uxbridge Sub is similarly preserved almost in its entirety as a rail trail to Lindsay from Uxbridge. I've done it twice.

Using the old TH&B rail trail is permanently dead with the construction of the Fortinos on Main Street West. The land is gone.

 

[innsertnamehere]

orrillia is essentially cut off from rail access today, the best it can ask for is a GO bus running from Allandale up highway 11.

An extension to collingwood is possible however, if not really realistic.

Reactivation of the uxbridge sub to Lindsay doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and the old rail line has been built over in the urban portion of Lindsay anyway. If it were to be extended (let's just get GO service to Uxbridge first at least), it would have to terminate at a park and ride on the edge of town. GO bus service to Lindsay from Oshawa GO might be useful though.

I think the key for a lot of these outer edge of the GTA locations is a restructuring of ontarios poorly run bus service to better interact with GO rail lines.

 

[ShonTron]

Using the old TH&B rail trail is permanently dead with the construction of the Fortinos on Main Street West. The land is gone.

The old railbed goes through the Fortino's parking lot, the trail deviates around it. It's possible to take back the land (it's just a grocery store, after all) but I don't know why we should.

That said, I don't advocate returning rail services on the old TH&B, or the CN Uxbridge-Lindsay ROW. Yes, the track in the middle of Lindsay is now largely built upon. Both of these are far better used as recreational corridors. Removing he Newmarket Sub through Barrie was the biggest shame though, as it would have allowed the Canadian and the Northlander to stop in much larger cities. But the rail customers in Orillia were gone, the branch to Midland was pulled around 1990, and CN didn't want to maintain the lift bridge in Orillia. The the Bala sub, while more remote, is better for its freight trains. So that's that unfortunately.

Orillia has a few daily Northland buses still (operating out of the old Orillia CN Station) to Barrie and Toronto. There's still Can-Ar coach operating a bus to Lindsay from Toronto on a commuter schedule. But yes, that's a natural GO service from Oshawa. So is a train-meet bus to Port Hope and Cobourg, but GO is not yet ready to expand its service area to Northumberland County.

The track to Collingwood is essentially abandoned between Utopia (the CP junction near Angus) and Collingwood. Some crossings have already been removed. The track into Downtown Collingwood has been gone since the early 1990s anyway, the final years were to serve industries on the south end of that town.

 

[ssiguy2]

I guess a rail link to Brantford isn't really a good option then but you would think it would still get decent enough ridership to Hamilton to qualify for decent GO bus connections.

Cambridge maybe more expensive due to non-ownership by GO but I think it will eventually happen. Milton is the fastest growing city in Canada and as it spreads further west there may need to be an extension of GO just to serve those newer areas and Cambridge isn't far beyond that. The Cambridge from Milton extension is a very direct one and I think the ridership is there.

Is the rail to Niagara only happen in the summer?

 

[salsa]

Barrie has reconfigured the road system near its waterfront with the removal of the Newmarket Sub north of Allandale. Its plans for redevelopment don't jive with bringing rail back, and a short section of the ROW near the Barrie/Oro-Medonte boundary has been built upon. The rest of the route is a great cycling trail.

Off topic, but last summer I was on that cycling trail between Barrie and Orillia, and to be honest I didn't find it to be particularly beautiful or scenic outside of the urban areas. It was quite boring actually. This picture sums up the entire 30 or so km:

But NW of Orillia it gets much better.

In fact many sections are paved as you move towards Midland.

 

[MisterF]

Thanks for the info.

I'm kind of surprised by that. The GO Kitchener station is basically useless to Cambridge even with the eventual LRT connection and is a very direct route from Milton.

Brantford/Paris has about 130,000 any while not many Toronto commuters there are a lot going to Hamilton and MacU. Also Paris is a bit of a tourist town. VIA is an option but the service is pretty bad and useless for daily commuter to Toronto or Hamilton. I think Niagara is a natural but not Peterborough..........I think it's too far and remote.

How far does Lakeshore go? Any planes for extensions to Port Hope/Coburg?

Peterborough, like many Canadian cities and towns, is a case of the government killing the rail service by investing in highways and starving rail. Declaring the rail service infeasible is easy when you stack the deck against it. Peterborough is large enough to support passenger service (120,000 CMA), although the case would be stronger if the line connected to the Lakeshore line in Durham. I think passenger service to cities like Cambridge, Peterborough, and maybe even Collingwood will start to happen after HSR starts operating and people start to reconsider what passenger rail in Canada can be.

 

[ShonTron]

Off topic, but last summer I was on that cycling trail between Barrie and Orillia, and to be honest I didn't find it to be particularly beautiful or scenic outside of the urban areas. It was quite boring actually. This picture sums up the entire 30 or so km:

The Barrie-Orillia trail is great in the sense that it is well-maintained (and apart from one somewhat awkward section heading out of Barrie). But like most rail trails, it isn't especially scenic (it's flat and through farmland and woodlands). But I did see a beaver swimming around in adjacent pond to the rail bed.

I did the whole trip in 2013 from Barrie to Midland and back (staying overnight in Midland). I was disappointed to see how poor the trail was heading northwest from Orillia, but so happy to see it paved from Highway 400 to Downtown Midland.

 

[WislaHD]

I've always been curious, why is there no plans for a Courtice GO station between Oshawa and Bowmanville?

 

[nfitz]

I've always been curious, why is there no plans for a Courtice GO station between Oshawa and Bowmanville?

There isn't really that many people down at Trullis Road and Baseline. And it's 3.5 km from Trullis Road and 2 to there. It's only 5 km from Trullis/2 to Harmony and the CP tracks - aren't there plans to build the third Oshawa GO station somewhere near there?