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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
That's strange. I was checking gotracker.ca here and there and it didn't mention any Milton line trains being cancelled. And the departure board once I got to Union around 5:30 showed 17:55 and it didn't have any notes that it was cancelled. It just said to go to platform 4 for the 17:55 train. Whereas Lakeshore line departures did mention cancellations and adjustments. All that matters was that there was a train at 17:55.
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GO Tracker was completely wrong throughout the crisis. I was following GO Tracker throughout the evening and there was very little correlation between it and the Union departure board. Even the departure board would change the stopping pattern for individual trains from one minute to another.

GO was writing timetables on the fly and assigning trains to it in real time. It was honestly wild to see them writing them in real time in the trip planner. Here's an example of them rewriting the 17:21 schedule, which was originally The PM Peak express to Niagara Falls.

When they put it on the departure board they were still in the process of updating the schedule. The train was still shown as an express train, and for whatever reason the train's return trip from Niagara was partially shown as well.
Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 17.48.17.png

A few minutes later the new schedule was ready, with all stops to Niagara Falls, and a separate return trip later in the evening. The departure times were mostly copied from the original express train's timetable, which resulted in totally unrealistic travel times from Union to Clarkson. Mimico to Long Branch in 2 minutes would be an average speed of 150 km/h including the dwell at Long Branch. But that didn't matter since the train was half an hour late anyway. The priority was presumably just writing a schedule as quickly as possible with the correct stops.
Screenshot 2023-10-03 at 18.32.41.png


I can only imagine how hectic it was for GO's planners and dispatchers last night, their workload was probably ten times normal - every train (except perhaps some Milton line trains) had to be manually rescheduled.

For whatever reason, only about half of the changes were making it into GO Tracker and lots of trains simply disappeared off the tracker, though they were in fact still running. My guess is that this is when trains dropped off when they abandoned their original schedule (relative to which they were several hours late), and the new schedule never made it into GO Tracker for some reason.
 
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Some information from the Star
The outage, described by CN as an “internet connectivity and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) issue,” forced the railway giant’s computerized signal system offline. At one point, rail traffic controllers were reduced to issuing orders by pen and paper, sources told The Canadian Press. Those orders were then relayed by radio to stalled trains up and down the tracks, where some trains, and passengers, were forced to wait for hours.
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According to CN, GO and Via trains require a connection to CN’s servers to navigate safely in and out of Union Station. When CN lost its own internet connectivity Tuesday afternoon, that central connection between and among the different lines was also lost.

During the outage, CN temporarily took over dispatching duties for GO and Via. That allowed the partial resumption of commuter services. Just after 8 p.m. Tuesday night, CN announced that its internet connectivity had been restored, allowing GO to fully resume dispatching its own lines.
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Some downsteam effects still in play this morning.

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anb said:
So this is basically the transit version of the Rogers outage that happened last year.
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Pretty much, yes. Or the last great hydro blackout.

Seriously though after this, there will for sure be some people who will turn away from the train and going back/going to start driving again or carpool. This might be where they pull the 30 min all day service to Bramalea/Unionville and bring back 15 min all day to Oakville and Oshawa to try to win some riders back.
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Perhaps, but they will then encounter highway gridlock and delays because of truck rollovers or fatal accidents, fires, flooding, blizzards, or whatever. GO's reliability is still what it is - pretty good but not perfect.

This event is mostly notable because such events are rare and we are brought to a standstill when they do happen. Hopefully it's a one-of, and appropriate root cause analysis and corrective action happens. Both CN and ML have mutual self interest to not let this get away from them.

First world problem.

- Paul
 
anb said:
Seriously though after this, there will for sure be some people who will turn away from the train and going back/going to start driving again or carpool.
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Turning away from transit because there was a disruption of some sort does not strike me as a rational response, anymore than turning away from walking because it started raining while you were out.
 
T3G said:
Turning away from transit because there was a disruption of some sort does not strike me as a rational response, anymore than turning away from walking because it started raining while you were out.
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I think it could be the last straw for some people who had to stand the whole trip every day etc.
 
T3G said:
Well, if such a person does actually exist (which I highly doubt), they are in for a rude awakening next time they find themselves in rush hour traffic on the 401.
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I work in a place that does 5 days a week in office, we have people drive from all corners of the Golden Horseshoe including st Catherine’s. Everyone drives because the times ended up being more consistent and less of a hassle
 
T3G said:
I didn't deny the existence of people who drive, I denied the existence of someone who's so fickle and awful at judging situations that they would turn to driving, itself a possible source of immense disruptions, after an immense disruption on GO.
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I actually started driving to a previous job after three TTC service suspensions in a week during rush hour. It's not only because of that but it was the last straw for me, passengers playing music out loud on every single trip, junkies smoking crack on the platform, and having to stand the whole way were the contributing factors but having to wait in the cold for several shuttle busses to pass got me to stop riding for work.
 
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