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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

At this point, I've got no faith in Metrolinx or any of its political masters on either side of the aisle, so there's egg on everyone's face. That being said, yes, I am singling out Metrolinx for their particular brand of incompetence over the last however many years. Realistically, as some on this forum have pointed out before, that Metrolinx is not truly firewalled from political interference predetermined its fate.
 
Is this true? Is Metrolinx robbing Peter to pay Paul?

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How close are they to being able to run 12-coach trains on all lines, at all times? How many more coaches would they need? Also, given the mid-day trains on the Barrie, Kitchener, and Stouffville lines, would it even make sense to run 12 coach trains for those trips or does the current running of trains with six coaches save on fuel and time?
 
What I meant to ask was did those two new cars added to the rush-hour Kitchener line train last week come by pulling two cars off a Lakeshore East train? Sure, one trip is in the morning, the other is the afternoon, but I know train cars can't magically move around to different trains on different lines very fast. Did they take two from the Lakeshore East line and shove them onto trains for the Kitchener line with the hope that a PR problem would go away, but then they actually created a new one?

No, that's not what they did.

The 7.36am train was planned to be reduced to 10 cars with the January service changes. I haven't seen a cycling schedule yet, but I suspect that the trainset that did that run was changed and the afternoon run no longer needed a 12-car train anymore - and thus it was shortened.

There are currently enough extra cars in the fleet that if they needed to add 2 more cars to a number of trains tomorrow that they could - provided that those trains spent the night in a location that allowed for the storage of a 12-car train.

Dan
 
How close are they to being able to run 12-coach trains on all lines, at all times? How many more coaches would they need? Also, given the mid-day trains on the Barrie, Kitchener, and Stouffville lines, would it even make sense to run 12 coach trains for those trips or does the current running of trains with six coaches save on fuel and time?
Small bit of trivia - some midday trains already run with 12 cars. That’s a bit of overkill for current ridership, but as @smallspy points out, it’s all about how the equipment needs to be cycled.

- Paul
 
It is likely true and done in the name of "efficiency". Why have 12 cars if you can cram the same amount of people in 10. Saves money on fuel and you bring in the same revenue.

I'm not so sure about that. If you're going to cram an extra 50-100 people into each of the other 10 cars on the train, you're going to significantly increase the dwell time, which means more riders will choose to drive and the train is wasting money sitting idle. If dwell times are really bad, it can delay trains behind it, and those knock-on effects add up significantly. I'd imagine that if it was really bad one day and the dwell times added up to an extra 16 minutes of travel time into union, they are looking at something around 20,000K they will have to pay out in compensation for being late.

Of course, these are all extremes and they're likely not to happen, but even if GO loses 50 customers because of this change, that could add up to 300,000$ in lost revenue per year. Surely this move was made for logistical purposes and not a really bad attempt at cost cutting.
 
Small bit of trivia - some midday trains already run with 12 cars. That’s a bit of overkill for current ridership, but as @smallspy points out, it’s all about how the equipment needs to be cycled.

- Paul

Not just midday - as of the previous set of schedule changes in September all of the weekend trains - save for the Niagara Falls special trains - were scheduled to be run with 12-car sets.

Dan
 
^ Did the January schedule change remove two coaches some of the PM peak Kitchener Line trains? I remember seeing the Minister tweet that "two coaches would be added" to some runs.
 

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