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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

crs1026 said:
...but it does show that lots of stuff happens, far too often.
Click to expand...
Canadian railways fail to properly report accidents, regulator says
Eric Atkins

The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Oct. 27, 2014 11:11AM EDT

More than 250 rail accidents went unreported by Canadian railways between 2007 and 2013, omissions the country’s transportation watchdog says hinder efforts to improve safety on the railroads.

The Transportation Safety Board said on Monday its audits of rail collisions, derailments and spills at three railways, including the company involved in the Lac-Mégantic disaster of 2013, found carriers failed to follow mandatory reporting requirements by notifying the government of incidents late or not at all. The TSB said it will consider “enforcement action” including fines to address future non-compliance with the reporting requirements.

The TSB said the majority of the accidents in question at Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, Canadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. were minor, and occurred in rail yards with no injuries.

“Most of those occurrences are small and minor, but they are still reportable,” said Jean Laporte, chief operating officer of TSB, an independent government investigation body whose mandate includes transportation by rail, air, water and pipeline. “If we see that we’ve got lots of wheels that come off the track, someone’s got ask the question why, and deal with that before before it leads to accidents. That’s the point of it being reported.”

According to recently updated TSB regulations, railways and their employees must report incidents that include collisions or derailments; a risk of collision between rail cars and/or locomotives; switches left in improper positions; accidental release of dangerous goods or radiation and a train failing to obey a stop signal. Previously, railways only had to report accidents that resulted in damage that affected safe operations.

The watchdog uncovered the accidents by auditing the company’s books, questioning railways on variations in accident trends as well as from the railways themselves as they came across accident reports at the end of a quarter or year.

The number of rail accidents recorded by the TSB has declined over the past 10 years to 1,090 in 2013 from 1,413 in 2004. However, the 2013 accident total is an increase from 2012. [...]
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...cidents-over-seven-years-tsb/article21312626/

Similar story here:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/rail-safety-tsb-discovers-companies-not-reporting-all-derailments-1.2598417

Note! These are derailments, not just near misses....

Ten page report from a conservative Univ of Calgary department:
SAFETY IN NUMBERS:
EVALUATING CANADIAN
RAIL SAFETY DATA
Jennifer Winter
†
After the horrific and deadly train explosion at Lac-Mégantic, Que. in the summer of 2013,
there are serious questions being raised publicly about the safety of Canada’s rail-transport
system. Unfortunately, Canada’s public rail-safety data are currently in no shape to provide
the answers to those questions.
When Canadians ask, as many have in recent months, whether the rail-transport system is
“safe,” they surely want to know whether the accident record is low — compared to other
countries and to other forms of transport — and whether it has been improving or getting
worse over time. Yet, the statistics that might provide the answers are worryingly
inaccessible, sometimes conflicting, and in certain cases not available at all.
The inability to publicly monitor airline safety statistics would be considered unacceptable.
Yet trains transporting volatile goods across Canada arguably expose entire communities,
as in Lac-Mégantic, to potentially catastrophic dangers. How is it, then, that the
Transportation Safety Board, Transport Canada and Statistics Canada do not even publicly
report something as basic as the number of train trips made every year in Canada? Nor do
their statistics distinguish between incidents and accidents involving passenger trains and
those involving freight trains. And how is it that the total number of accidents in some years
is reported differently by these various monitoring organizations?
If Canadians are, as it appears, destined to see increasing volumes of goods, specifically
dangerous goods, transported by rail, it is that much more important that the federal
government significantly improve the reporting of rail-safety data. It is not only vital that our
railroads are safe; it is just as vital for the public to have information showing exactly how
safe they are.
[...continues at length...]
Click to expand...
https://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/winter-rail-safety-communique.pdf

And lest this seems irrelevant to this forum's premise, which pertains to GO...one has to wonder how different the regime of reporting is at GO? Are there more eyes looking over shoulders? Yes and no...certainly a lot more eyes will see the gaffes, but will they be reported to the regulators, let alone the public?

Seems that some have reported fires on the Sharyos. Not a word in the press. I trust the source of those stories, it's first hand, and proven to be reliable.

Only one way to address this, and GO have alluded to it themselves: PTC. Where's the leadership in Ottawa? (Queen's Park talk up a storm, but that's all it is, talk. The *imperatives* must come from Ottawa)
 
TOareaFan said:
https://twitter.com/GOtransit/status/777226379616251905

https://twitter.com/x/status/777226379616251905
Click to expand...

If you look at the area where it occurred, it's terrible for walkability. No legal crossings for so long.

CsmNxzHXEAArgFn.jpg:large
 
steveintoronto said:
And lest this seems irrelevant to this forum's premise, which pertains to GO...one has to wonder how different the regime of reporting is at GO? Are there more eyes looking over shoulders? Yes and no...certainly a lot more eyes will see the gaffes, but will they be reported to the regulators, let alone the public?

Seems that some have reported fires on the Sharyos. Not a word in the press. I trust the source of those stories, it's first hand, and proven to be reliable.

Only one way to address this, and GO have alluded to it themselves: PTC. Where's the leadership in Ottawa? (Queen's Park talk up a storm, but that's all it is, talk. The *imperatives* must come from Ottawa)
Click to expand...

Totally agree. A proper internal responsibility system is cricical for safety, and I'm not sure it's in place. But at best that's addressing a barn door after the fact. We need some form of PTC to reduce the number of events before they happen.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
We need some form of PTC to reduce the number of events before they happen.
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What I can't get my head around is that it's so obvious, in all ways, societally, functionally and financially. I'm neutral politically, but Trudeau is missing the blinding obvious with some infrastructure investment priority.

The obvious analogy is subways. Yonge, for instance, will handle considerably more people with the latest PTC. Union Station would do so for GO if there was PTC, it would pay for itself in a matter of years or less, not to mention all the other advantages, not the least safety.
 
steveintoronto said:
What I can't get my head around is that it's so obvious, in all ways, societally, functionally and financially. I'm neutral politically, but Trudeau is missing the blinding obvious with some infrastructure investment priority.
Click to expand...

Be careful what you ask for. A federal push to install PTC would have to cover all VIA routes in the corridor, and all commuter agencies, with the same general expectation. That would gobble up a whack of funding. Getting out ahead of the freight railways (who aren't in a hurry) would be problemmatic - so long as GO is on shared tracks, anything other than vanilla North American PTC as the freight railways will eventually install would be complex, even if other technologies are out there on the shelf ready to go. GO electrification is also a consideration before we resignal anything, as is VIA HFR.

So, while it's something whose time has come, we can't just dash out and implement it. It has to fit in at the right time and align to other things.

As usual, we've veered into another thread's domain. I will stop here.

- Paul
 
Had to go to Brampton through Malton GO today. What a customer unfriendly experience that was for a non-driver, schlepping across acres of cars to reach the BT stop across Derry Road with no route signs or shelter. Also, it seems if you have a cellphone with dead battery you can't find out much about afternoon GO bus schedules since the station closes at 10.30am and the display in the train access only shows, well, trains.
 
dowlingm said:
Had to go to Brampton through Malton GO today. What a customer unfriendly experience that was for a non-driver, schlepping across acres of cars to reach the BT stop across Derry Road with no route signs or shelter. Also, it seems if you have a cellphone with dead battery you can't find out much about afternoon GO bus schedules since the station closes at 10.30am and the display in the train access only shows, well, trains.
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Had a similar experience at Langstaff GO. And missed the bus as well.
 
denfromoakvillemilton said:
Had a similar experience at Langstaff GO. And missed the bus as well.
Click to expand...

Really? I've done a train-to-bus (Viva rapidway) transfer at Langstaff and found it to be pretty good. You don't have to cross a sea of cars at all...there's a sidewalk from the north end of the train platform that leads to stairs and an elevator, you take that up and over to the bus terminal, where GO and YRT/Viva are waiting, with the latter two being a $0.75 co-fare transfer at that. Yes, it's a bit of a walk, especially if you don't know beforehand to be on one of the northern coaches, but it's a platform/sidewalk and then there are even elevators.
 
Megaton327 said:
Really? I've done a train-to-bus (Viva rapidway) transfer at Langstaff and found it to be pretty good. You don't have to cross a sea of cars at all...there's a sidewalk from the north end of the train platform that leads to stairs and an elevator, you take that up and over to the bus terminal, where GO and YRT/Viva are waiting, with the latter two being a $0.75 co-fare transfer at that. Yes, it's a bit of a walk, especially if you don't know beforehand to be on one of the northern coaches, but it's a platform/sidewalk and then there are even elevators.
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Yup..I tried to take the RH bus straight downtown rather then VIVA and I missed it because I didn't know where the go bus was. Then I found out it was a limited
 
Sounds like by reading tweets (https://twitter.com/ThisCrazyTrain/status/780928594356961284) from CJ Smith (@ThisCrazyTrain) that the LSE had some problems tonight. The engine died on the 430pm train from Union to Oshawa and it took over four hours to make the trip. Apparently another engine had to be brought in to push it? I wonder where they would have had to get it from?

Then later tonight I read there was a gas leak at/near the Aurora GO station.
 
Allandale25 said:
Sounds like by reading tweets (https://twitter.com/ThisCrazyTrain/status/780928594356961284) from CJ Smith (@ThisCrazyTrain) that the LSE had some problems tonight. The engine died on the 430pm train from Union to Oshawa and it took over four hours to make the trip. Apparently another engine had to be brought in to push it? I wonder where they would have had to get it from?

Then later tonight I read there was a gas leak at/near the Aurora GO station.
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"Four hours"? Yikes...shid happens, but why did it take that long to get a push? There's some explaining to do on this one.
 
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