GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

[TOareaFan]

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.

I was at Union to catch the 6:50 KW train and it was a bit chaotic because the Barrie line had been suspended....it restarted around 6:45 and it was a safety officer standing right beside me that got on his walkie talkie to suggest that announcing the 6:45 train was boarding on tracks 9/10 at the same time there were screens displaying the "line suspended" message was not the best idea to move people along and end the confusion....by the time I left his request to have the line suspended message removed had not been answered.

 

[Mr_Praline]

"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.

I was on the 430 LSE along with CJ (and I sat with her for some of it). The engine died just after leaving Ajax station, and I mean juuuust after... like a couple hundred meters from the platform, tops. At about 5:10ish. The staff kept turning on and off the electrics and air con, finally just leaving it off for the last 1.5 hours, so it started smelling pretty rank in there.

From what we could tell, they were trying to fix it themselves for the first hour. Then they decided to get another engine to come back to either push us back to Ajax or pull us to Whitby. But I guess they don't have spares until the express trains are all done, so after 7pm...ish...?? There were announcements very intermittently as the poor harried CSA was not getting any information either.

Twitter had some rumours that following the engine failure, someone from our train had forced open a door and booked it back to Ajax station and jumped onto another eastbound train. Like literally jumped onto the outside. So that may have been one of the many other LSE delays - the email for the 600pm LSE said it was delayed due to our blocked track and "unruly passenger behaviour". But who really knows with Twitter.

They finally got an engine to come get us and we got pushed back to Ajax at 815 PM (following the 3rd or 4th brake check going through every coach). And we saw that it was actually the whole other train had come back to push us, not just an engine. Someone on the platform said they can't uncouple the engine from the passenger carsets easily, I'm sure someone else in the forums has more knowledge about that.

All in all, nobody hurt, hopefully everyone got home in one piece, so not a devastating experience, but it was still pretty rough with daycare pickups missed, appointments missed, and so on.

PLUS it was an end of the month run so most regular commuters were enthused about their GO service guarantee refund of ... $1.21.

 

[Northern Light]

Profoundly unacceptable.

CBC story here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...ken-train-for-3-hours-with-no-power-1.3781708

The excuses by GO are endless.

There simply is no way this was handled properly.

A refund is grossly inadequate.

If GO doesn't give every passenger $100 back, they should litigate.

 

[Allandale25]

They finally got an engine to come get us and we got pushed back to Ajax at 815 PM (following the 3rd or 4th brake check going through every coach). And we saw that it was actually the whole other train had come back to push us, not just an engine. Someone on the platform said they can't uncouple the engine from the passenger carsets easily, I'm sure someone else in the forums has more knowledge about that.

I wonder which train set they used and if it came from Oshawa or Union? Also, I wouldn't think the MP40 could push/pull a complete train set and the broken down one. Maybe in the future rather than trying to fix it they could find an engine and deadhead it to the location. Others may have a better understanding of the situation.

 

[steveintoronto]

it was actually the whole other train had come back to push us, not just an engine.

I wondered about that! It seems so freakin' obvious, that I had to then ask myself: "Perhaps they're not doing that since the pushing train has passengers on-board, and they'd have to be detrained by regulations before the train could be used in such a way?". So you've answered that one.

Someone on the platform said they can't uncouple the engine from the passenger carsets easily, I'm sure someone else in the forums has more knowledge about that.

They can uncouple them quite easily, but *brake tests* once doing that would have to be performed again. Perhaps the Railway Act and other pertaining acts give exceptions in the case of a blocked line and sufficiently qualified staff to visually control the operation? But even if the loco is uncoupled to do a push, the time taken for a brake test to recouple is minuscule compared to the hours it took just sitting there. Someone's going to have to rewrite their operating rules and procedures.

Btw: I followed the Twitter accounts on-line, I refuse to be a Twit on a cell-phone, and some tweets were obviously from people losing it. I don't blame them, there was next to no communication from an on-train staff left in the lurch by dispatch.

That "forced open door" is going to be yet another embarrassing thing for Aikens to lie abou...whoops, explain as per the Danforth Station incident a few months back, which turned out to be 3/4 wrong by GO's account.

I hope one of the newspapers does an in-depth story on this, not just this one incident, but a series of them that indicate GO's degree of incompetence.

Again, one wonders how they'd react in the case of a terrorist incident. We still haven't had an accounting of the 29 GO bus put into "lock down" with the bomb scare some months back. OPP told driver to "lock the passengers in" until they got there. WTF?

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Profoundly unacceptable.

CBC story here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toron...ken-train-for-3-hours-with-no-power-1.3781708

The excuses by GO are endless.

There simply is no way this was handled properly.

A refund is grossly inadequate.

If GO doesn't give every passenger $100 back, they should litigate.

The refund fallback is the most annoying - I understand that everyone want love freebies, but it's a piece of PR ploy that does absolutely nothing to affect change. Giving $100 back? This is an org that uses different definition of lateness (vs. on time performance of 5 mins) to define eligibility for refund in the first place. Like someone tell me what the 15 minute service guarantee translate into in terms of standard deviations from the mean.

Let's put it this way - the US DOT requires airlines to provide food and drinking water for airplanes on tarmac after a 2hr delay:

https://www.transportation.gov/brie...irline-tarmac-delays-provides-other-passenger

Not that GO should be preparing to provide both given the expectations of the nature of the trip (i.e. short), but this is an almost four hour wait with poor interior ventilation and extremely limited hygiene facilities and they have fallen to a level that is downright ridiculous. Like you're 100m away from the station - the train can be emptied without necessarily involving the "safety" defense - if you can evac a subway train in a tunnel with the 3rd rail, you can definitely coordinate doing the same for train this close to the station.

AoD

 

[steveintoronto]

I wouldn't think the MP40 could push/pull a complete train set and the broken down one.

It could with no problem, albeit speed would be limited. The question is whether the regulations permit it with passengers on-board, and whether mandatory brake tests have to be performed in the normal way, and with what staff necessary to oversee it?

I'm sure some of the finer points of the mechanics of this will be addressed by a poster.

 

[mdrejhon]

I wonder which train set they used and if it came from Oshawa or Union? Also, I wouldn't think the MP40 could push/pull a complete train set and the broken down one. Maybe in the future rather than trying to fix it they could find an engine and deadhead it to the location. Others may have a better understanding of the situation.

Actually, a single MP40 can snail-push about 50 cars (minimum) on level track -- just strugglingly, super slowly. Turtle. Snail. Definitely no positive gradients at that count. And no jammed axles (stuck brake, etc), of course.

Good enough for a 200 meter push back into a station.

Regardless. Need new procedures for this type of delay -- stat!

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Regardless. Need new procedures for this type of delay -- stat!

Before that, they need new procedures for communicating with delayed passengers.

AoD

 

[steveintoronto]

And no jammed axles, of course.

Oddly, Aitkens states "total failure"...but what does that mean exactly? She's a total failure? She'd be right. But there is the off-chance that part of the sequence of events was loss of brake pressure...which would raise another set of questions, but...again, with the defective loco isolated, the attaching consist ostensibly could recharge the brake lines.

There's a number of truly troubling and bizarre aspects to this case, even beyond the mechanical issues, the most obvious being since the consist was so close to the Ajax platform, and local police and/or GO staff could supplement the train staff, why wasn't an orderly evacuation undertaken when it looked hopeless to get the loco going?

Anyone remember the flooded train on the lower Don a few years back? How long did it take them to evacuate that, and under what procedures and regulations? I'm sure nothing has changed in regs since then, and that was a *far more challenging* evacuation since the water was waist deep, and they were nowhere near a station.

There's no way out of explaining this one...

 

[DonValleyRainbow]

I just can't believe that they didn't have a spare locomotive and crew at Willowbrook to deploy, or even at TMC (if VIA was willing to help). I know it was rush hour, but isn't there at least some extra to be scrambled? You would think that the emergency managers would have the ability to pick up the phone to another manager at Willowbrook/TMC and have someone pulling out to Ajax within 15 minutes, and then cover the 30-mile trip in less than an hour.

If they can't do that, they need to seriously think about their emergency plans.

 

[steveintoronto]

I just can't believe that they didn't have a spare locomotive and crew at Willowbrook to deploy, or even at TMC (if VIA was willing to help). I know it was rush hour, but isn't there at least some extra to be scrambled? You would think that the emergency managers would have the ability to pick up the phone to another manager at Willowbrook/TMC and have someone pulling out to Ajax within 15 minutes, and then cover the 30-mile trip in less than an hour.

If they can't do that, they need to seriously think about their emergency plans.

Access to the track to by-pass the backed-up trains would be necessary, in other words, X-over switches. I believe the standard procedure is to use the closest train, in a consist or not, to attach and push or tow, but there might be regs surrounding the need to detrain passengers before doing so. The real question, no matter how you look at this, is why they were prevented from detraining back to the platform. Moving between cars is easy and standard on those trains, and just like a subway, you can do it from the end door. I may have this wrong, correct me if so, but the locos are on the eastern end, and this was travelling east from Ajax when it happened, and so exiting from the western end back to the platform, in clear daylight and good weather should have been considered.

I and thousands of others would like to know why that wasn't done?

Edit: Just seeing what is being reported on this only to find this:

[Meanwhile, a gas leak at the Aurora GO station halted train service on the Barrie line during the evening rush, stranding as many as 10,000 passengers on four trains.

Metrolinx worked with police to get people safely out of the trains. There were no reported injuries.]
http://www.680news.com/2016/09/27/go-passengers-delayed-hours-major-problems-two-lines/

So why in Hell wasn't the same procedure followed for the Ajax incident?

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

As to the issue of someone forcing the door open - cannot condone it, but it's not unexpected - recall the issue with Skytrain systems failure awhile ago

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...-forcing-skytrain-doors-open/article20023575/

The surprising thing isn't that one person did it - but that there weren't more attempts in the poorly ventilated cars.

AoD

 

[steveintoronto]

The surprising thing isn't that one person did it - but that there weren't more attempts in the poorly ventilated cars.

Trying to get a charge against someone doing this to stick in court would be nigh impossible. Three hours? The presenting of evidence of "inhumane conditions" would get any charge tossed. GO would only end up exacerbating their cause by charging anyone, as losing the case would just encourage more.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Apparently GO is giving everyone a $100 refund - guess it's all appreciative noises now. Pity. They must have wanted this one to go away quickly.

Trying to get a charge against someone doing this to stick in court would be nigh impossible. Three hours? The presenting of evidence of "inhumane conditions" would get any charge tossed. GO would only end up exacerbating their cause by charging anyone, as losing the case would just encourage more.

Would they charge anyone - instead of issuing tickets?

AoD