And how much experience does DB have with operating in North America?
I wouldn't expect too much of them, especially at the start. They are going to have a very steep learning curve.
Dan
I believe Deutsche Bahn's International Operations first passenger rail contract is GO RER, though they recently won a contract in India which will begin operations this year. They also have a freight contact in Uruguay starting this year.
I think everything else DB operates uses, at least partially, German infrastructure. In short, their Operations branch is very new to anything outside Western Europe.
Their Engineering and Consulting branch has done quite a bit of work outside Germany, but not operations and Alstom has the engineering role for GO.
Will DB have some unique interactions with NA ops and practice? Yes, but most of the trackage where we will be operating frequent service is owned by MX with freight as the guest, I think it's very concerning to suggest that they should not be aiming to operate in a non-North American way, thats why we are installing ETCS and other infra that is used in Europe. DB has worked on other stuff in NA too. There is of course a learning curve, but I would guess thats why there are
so many years of planning between the consortium and MX before implementation. Basically, they aren't going to be operating on a
typical North American railway, I mean GO is already unlike most operations on the continent!
Of course we are hiring DB so that they can operate trains
their way, of course they will need to accomodate for truly necessarily North American things like loading gauge - and mixed traffic where it exists, but a lot of stuff we do is not set in stone. Even if all they do is propose improvements to the way we do things today as opposed to a paradigm shift. And yes, these things are compatible, Australia and Mex come to mind as places where both ETCS and a lot of Euro derived infra is mixed with heavy NA style freight.
Edit: TBC this isn't really meant to be pointed at either of you, just a broader sense I worry about that we will bring DB in to just do things how we do them today. A ton of the projects we are doing and have done in the past on the GO network are to enable more isolation from the trad mainline rail network so that we
can operate stuff differently.
^Clearly, getting headways down under 30 minutes - 15 would be ideal - is critical. Hourly is acceptable for longer distances where even with a wait, the overall transit time is competitive to driving.
To my mind the limiting factor for regional service is the poor quality of first mile/last mile rather than the speed or frequency of the backbone rail service. We can’t rely on parking garages at stations to handle all the potential ridership. The whole playing field needs to be adjusted - municipalities are not well aligned to deliver people to GO, and for the majority of the suburban area we are not going to attract ridership door to door by running 40-foot buses deep into suburban neighbourhoods. Nor are municipalities likely to fund or apply innovation to their local transit operations to achieve this, even though there may be mutual benefit. We need a new “pact”, and Ontario may need to pony up the starting investment and perhaps financial incentives to riders and to municipalities to get things going.
- Paul
TTC attracts oodles of ridership with a good suburban last mile bus service, and a lot of the 905 has this service - it just needs beefing up and expanding to connect with trains that don't just run during rush hour.
I would like to be proven wrong, but let's perhaps temper our expectations for DB. They seem to do well enough in Germany, but I suspect GO Expansion will be delivered by a subsidiary of the company like Arriva. And the thought of anything like Arriva coming to take over GO should be adequate cause for panic. Their lack of vision, service planning has given a handful of bus operators in the former Czechoslovakia no end of difficulties.
It's not Arriva. This is a very different project - they are involved deeply in infra and planning, not just operating existing trains on existing infrastructure.
