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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

Eclipse trips have been announced:

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Announcements like this make me wish beach towns on Lake Erie such as Port Dover still had rail service. I know Port Stanley does but it's not connected to the greater network.

With the desire for more car free weekends escapes having train service would have been really convenient for Eclipse trains instead of them all going to Niagara. Niagara is going to be a gong show. A special boat cruise just south of Toronto into the middle of Lake Ontario would have been a better idea with less chaos.
 
Announcements like this make me wish beach towns on Lake Erie such as Port Dover still had rail service. I know Port Stanley does but it's not connected to the greater network.

With the desire for more car free weekends escapes having train service would have been really convenient for Eclipse trains instead of them all going to Niagara. Niagara is going to be a gong show. A special boat cruise just south of Toronto into the middle of Lake Ontario would have been a better idea with less chaos.
Port Stanley does.
 
Interesting. I don’t see specific mention of OnCorr in the budget (https://budget.ontario.ca/2024/chapter-1a.html#s-8)

Should I read anything into that?
My understanding is that it's always been considered separate from the 'On Corr' budget. It's considered 'off-corridor' just like work that happens between Aldershot-Niagara, the Bowmanville Extension, Bramalea-Kitchener, Richmond Hill Line, and the Milton Line. Maybe one day a Bolton Line, too. You can see 'off-corridor' references over the years in the Capital Projects Group reports to Metrolinx board meetings cc @crs1026
 
My understanding is that it's always been considered separate from the 'On Corr' budget. It's considered 'off-corridor' just like work that happens between Aldershot-Niagara, the Bowmanville Extension, Bramalea-Kitchener, Richmond Hill Line, and the Milton Line. Maybe one day a Bolton Line, too. You can see 'off-corridor' references over the years in the Capital Projects Group reports to Metrolinx board meetings cc @crs1026

Most definitely, OnCorr was a specific bundle of routes and functions, and some projects especially things that were added to ML's mandate after procurement began are not included, for now.

Yesterday's budget has only one dollar line for transit, and it's not discernible what is in that number, but I don't see any indication that there is any less commitment to OnCorr. The verbiage is politically driven and clearly there were other things that Ford wanted to highlight more.... especially highway projects.

- Paul
 
I love when they say they added 2 trains to Milton but it's really just 1 extra trip in the morning and an extra trip in the evening. Even if they doubled that, it's not much and not back to pre-Covid service.
I believe they did that a few months back, quoting weekly additional trains along the Kitchener corridor to make it sound enormous.
 

According to [sister] Brittney and [mother] Ruth, autopsy results showed zero drugs or alcohol in Vivienne’s body; Ruth emphasized her daughter’s death wasn’t a suicide, as she’s heard some have speculated. “People saying horrible things online doesn’t help us.”

The pair relayed to the Star details of a security video the police and coroner’s office described to them. They said they were told Vivienne and her boyfriend were walking on eastbound tracks when they appeared to move onto the westbound tracks to avoid an approaching train, but another train was fast approaching on the westbound tracks. The family says the two teens appeared to never see it before they were struck.

According to the UP Express website, the airport trains can travel up to 140 kilometres an hour.

“I think because of the vibration, lights and sound of that (eastbound train), they didn’t even notice the other one from behind,” Ruth said, describing her conversation with police and the coroner through tears.

Confirmed misadventure. Train time is anytime folks. A heartbreaking story nonetheless. As a father, it's stuff like this that keeps me up at night. Kids screw up, and we sometimes just have to pray we've given them all the tools and advice to not screw up in a life-altering way.

Looping back to our conversation about noise walls, this article seems to confirm my suspicion that noise walls against people's backyards would not have done the trick. The access was gained from open space areas adjacent to the creek and/or roads. Perhaps that will lead to better fencing / barriers in these spots.

But ultimately, there's going to always be gaps, and I think the most practical remedy to this kind of incident is continued investment in safety talks at schools (Operation Lifesaver). This is one of the WORST corridors in the GTA to be playing on, and they should not have set foot on the tracks.
 
I feel for the parents, but these kids are old enough to have been informed several times of the danger of walking on tracks. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
It's tempting to write it off as "kids being stupid". But we should not be lead into thinking we couldn't have done more.

I will admit to walking on tracks as a teenager, on low-speed CN tracks serving local auto plants. One time, I was even playing with a friend on a 50 foot high wooden trestle, hauling weird shit like bikes and barrels to throw it off the side. And we almost got caught up there, after about a half-hour, a train came sailing around a curve into our view. If we had forgot to look as frequently as we did, or if we mis-stepped between the ties bolting off of the trestle, we could have been killed or seriously injured (from the train and/or the fall)

We did it because we believed, from previous observation, that the trains ran slow. We were confident that if a train came, we'd had enough time to get out of the way, we even discussed it at length before doing it. We were invincible and smart teenagers. But we could have been wrong about the train speed, and we certainly didn't factor in the risk of snags or falls.

Side note: the sign waning "Danger: High Speed Trains" with a picture of an ICE 1 train did little to convince us, as that's not what we really saw. That's a lesson in effective signage.

I haven't been to a GO / Metrolinx school presentation, and it's been a long time since I went to an Op Lifesaver presentation. But I hope it factors this in, especially for the older kids. You think you know, but teenagers have a lot of brain development still going on, and risk-taking and analysis is still not fully developed I know I'm preaching to a lot of other parents and former teenagers here, but it's an important point to highlight: accidents happen, risk factors pile up. Cases like this serve as a good example of 'you think you know, but they didn't'. There's also the anti-authority element. But if we can do better to reinforce the real danger, there's a greater chance of kids *telling each other* to avoid the danger. Another 15 year old saying "Bruh, that's crazy, stick to the side" is likely going to work better than a guy in a shiny vest saying anything in a school gym.

Anyway, stepping off the soapbox here, I am curious how Metrolinx responds, and if that means better fencing along rights of way.
 

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