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TTC: Flexity Streetcars Testing & Delivery (Bombardier)

TOareaFan said:
I think most of us "get" that they mean in service in the general sense that they are available for service......at any given time any streetcar (or any vehicle ) may be not physcially moving/serving at any given time.
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Yes. It's a fair question to ask what the fleet utilization is. TTC ought to have stats about number dispatched per day, mileage, bad orders, runs missed, etc. on a daily or weekly basis. That's the more appropriate way to judge reliability.

Dialing up Transee and counting the number on the road at a single point in time is not meaningful or informative.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
Yes. It's a fair question to ask what the fleet utilization is. TTC ought to have stats about number dispatched per day, mileage, bad orders, runs missed, etc. on a daily or weekly basis. That's the more appropriate way to judge reliability.

Dialing up Transee and counting the number on the road at a single point in time is not meaningful or informative.

- Paul
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but when they issue a tweet saying that vehicle X is now in service because its finishing their testing is in no way them commenting/judging reliability.
 
TOareaFan said:
but when they issue a tweet saying that vehicle X is now in service because its finishing their testing is in no way them commenting/judging reliability.
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Exactly......at this point, any little nugget of good news will get reported. It's all they have.

- Paul
 
crs1026 said:
Yes. It's a fair question to ask what the fleet utilization is. TTC ought to have stats about number dispatched per day, mileage, bad orders, runs missed, etc. on a daily or weekly basis. That's the more appropriate way to judge reliability.
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Agreed. Where do we see that information?
 
pstogios said:
They still need FOUR for training 15 MONTHS since the first of these were delivered?

Does anyone really believe that?
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Well I don't know what's involved in training, or how many hours training a single operator takes, so I don't know what to believe. I recall a few months ago only a small fraction of streetcar operators had been trained. Maybe @smallspy can provide some insight.
 
pstogios said:
They still need FOUR for training 15 MONTHS since the first of these were delivered?

Does anyone really believe that?
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We went through this somewhere back in the thread but I'm not finding it. Essentially, IIRC, each operator receives 2 weeks of training and they can train 2 operators per day per car. If it's one month between deliveries (I'm being hypothetical) then each training car can train at least 4 operators in that time. 2 training cars trains a minimum of 8 drivers per month. That's more drivers than could possibly cover the shifts added for a new streetcar arriving. Also forget that we've been training drivers at this rate for over a year now. So that means 2 training cars is training drivers faster than the cars can arrive and tons of drivers must be trained already.
 
4401 is available for training now (when not in maintenance etc). The question is when does that go to Thunder Bay, as 4402 did, at which point training will only happen on service vehicles.
 
At this point, there's only a handful of the 600 or so streetcar operators that haven't been trained on the new cars yet, so that's not the problem. I suspect that virtually all of the maintenance staff has gone through their training as well.

And 4401 can not be used for training TTC operators or maintenance staff. They use it to test software changes, new components, new sections of trackwork, emergency procedures, etc.

So....yeah, I have no idea why they seem to be holding so many of them back from service. I can understand one of them, as the one overnight car is scheduled to be in service for about 26 hours or so - and thus will likely be left in the barn as a change-off car as necessary. But the other 3 or 4? Perhaps trying to even out the mileage on them?

Dan
Toronto, Ont.
 
smallspy said:
Perhaps trying to even out the mileage on them?
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I have seen this mileage-equalisation thing come up before, and frankly it baffles me. How will we ever equalise the mileage between 4403 and 4596, which won't arrive for a couple years? Does 4403 get to rest on its oars for a year when the later ones arrive?

I would think that over the cars' lifetime, pure random chance would deal with this. Sure, there may be a winner or loser, so deal with that in a few years.

At this point in the contract, I would actually think that running the **** out of one or two would be a good thing - to get a heads up on any wear and tear issues that may be coming, to prepare a program for when they become common issues for the fleet.

So, let 'em loose, is what I would say. Just tell the operators to take any new vehicle they see available.

- Paul
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Interesting. Does that mean we wont see 4401 in service any time soon?
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4401 needs to go back to Thunder Bay for modifications before it will ever see service. The same modifications that were already done to 4400 which was shipped back to Thunder Bay previously, and are currently being done to 4402 (which was shipped back in June 2015).

BTW, you can see 4400 after it left Toronto in Google Maps in Ottawa at the NRC climatic testing facility in Ottawa. The imagery date is September 24, 2013 according to Google Earth: https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.3313267,-75.6429718,44m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
 
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smallspy said:
At this point, there's only a handful of the 600 or so streetcar operators that haven't been trained on the new cars yet, so that's not the problem. I suspect that virtually all of the maintenance staff has gone through their training as well

....

But the other 3 or 4? Perhaps trying to even out the mileage on them?
Click to expand...

This has been my point for months.

The mileage-equalization thing could be what's going on (as dumb as it is). Today at 5:30 pm I saw 4406, 4407, 4408, 4409, 4411 and 4412 out. Clearly, the older cars are being left out of service.
 
pstogios said:
Today at 5:30 pm I saw 4406, 4407, 4408, 4409, 4411 and 4412 out. Clearly, the older cars are being left out of service.
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I pointed out above that both 4400 and 4403 were out yesterday. And 4410 is out right now. This only leaves 4404 and 4405. Not sure that's enough to establish a pattern of "older cars being left out of service".
 
nfitz said:
I pointed out above that both 4400 and 4403 were out yesterday. And 4410 is out right now. This only leaves 4404 and 4405. Not sure that's enough to establish a pattern of "older cars being left out of service".
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Ok.

Now we are back to having zero explanation for why so many of these are left out of service at any given time.

Training - out.
Preserving mileage - out.
Maintenance - unclear - how do we get information about this?

Do you have any other theories?

Here's one: TTC doesn't feel under any pressure to put them out. So they don't.
 
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