bielawski
New Member
Sadly I'm like this when I'm sober. To start off, the choices to make VIA the only way to get from Brantford to London and to discontinue VIA service to Kitchener aren't based on any facts, just gut feeling.What do you drink? I'd like to buy you one and discuss the western portions.
Good point. I was reluctant to do this at first because of the slightly discouraging ridership on the current rush hour trains, but they're a bit early/late for Kitchener-Guelph morning/afternoon commutes. I'll add it to the map. As for adding more peak trains, it would be possible to extend the E trains arriving in Guelph back west to Kitchener (for 15 minute frequency) if the track was fully twinned (the cost calculations assume a 10 km single-track gap).One big thing though, with highway 7 the way it is, the Kitchener-Guelph section would be able to handle those kinds of frequencies all day instead of just during rush periods. Maybe 20 minutes during rush if GO can buy the line and with triple tracking at stations.
On the York, eastern Milton, and Midtown lines the setup would be mostly triple-track with one track reserved for freights, one for GO, and the remaining one used as a passing track. On the other lines where freight traffic is relatively frequent, freight trains would have slots of 5 minutes or so immediately before a passenger train every half hour. This kind of operation would of course break down if headways were to become better than the ~10 minutes shown on the map. (The inner section of the Lakeshore line, with a continuous four tracks for most of the way, would work similarly to the double-track lines despite the narrower headways.) Keep in mind that all this is based on how things are done in Switzerland, where it's the norm to see a freight train pulling off into a siding, a passenger train passing it in the same direction, and the freight continuing on less than three minutes afterwards.How do you account for the freight traffic though? Does it use some of those lines, or does it have it's own trans-GTA line that isn't shown there?
If you'd like to see the detailed track counts for the individual lines you can download this file*and open it with JOSM: the tracks=* tag is the total number of electrified tracks and the new=* tag is the number of tracks that would have to be added. I didn't bother making a pretty map of this (yet?).