dowlingm
Senior Member
@Trackside_Treasure what is this diagram from?
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VIA Rail
- Thread starter ehlow
- Start date
dowlingm
Senior Member
The B car has a coupler on one side which needs to be joined to the locomotive, but is probably not like the external loco and cab couplers
nfitz
Superstar
How do they put 2 or 3 B cars together then in the other two layouts?
dowlingm
Senior Member
Two kinds of B cars I guess. VIA isn’t shy about complicating things - look at Ocean and how the couplers create weird constraints especially in the Ren part.
Trackside_Treasure
Active Member
My brain.
Bordercollie
Senior Member
So since it's not enough to cover the corridor, will there be trip cancellations if the LRC's are retired?
KevinT
Senior Member
Thanks, nice to see it visualized like this!
If/when the shunt enhancers get installed, I wonder if we'd ever see LBEC sets running on a segment like Sarnia-Toronto? I remember as a kid when it was serviced by just two or three Budd cars. (That was my first train ride ever, and I felt cheated that it wasn't a real train. I know rail fans love them, but they felt old and dingy to me even back then in 1980 or 81.)
reaperexpress
Senior Member
WHAT?! Via has been running J-trains since before the Siemens trains were even ordered! Combining 50/60 and 52/62 makes a big difference to rail traffic on Lakeshore East in the morning peak. How could Siemens possibly claim that their product doesn't support J-train operations?
I've summarized the specs for these three configurations:
The total number of seats is roughly the same but the distribution is very different - the 7-car sets have a much higher percentage of Business seats. That would make them better suited for runs such as Toronto-Montreal with lots of business travel. Milk-run services serving the smaller cities and towns along the routes would presumably have a higher percentage of Economy class demand and would be better served by the 2x 3-car sets.
The 7-car sets have barely half the power-to-weight ratio of the 2x 3-car short sets, so they would be best used on services with minimal stops, such as Toronto-Montreal. Services with frequent stops are better served by the 2x 3-car sets.
Hopefully there's a solution to the train cycling puzzle that puts the 7-car sets on express services as much as possible, while the 2x 3-car sets get put on local services as much as possible.
The elephant in the room with combining coaches into longer trains is that some departures will need to be cancelled due to the reduction in total trainsets. The trains that remain will also need to make more stops, to maintain service at intermediate stations despite the cancelled trains.
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dowlingm
Senior Member
The HEP fleet will presumably remain until shunt enhancer work is completed and the trainsets reformed. At least the Siemens equipment is new and won’t need cycling through heavy refit (other than shunt enhancer install). As for the LRC retirement… who knows when that will be?
reaperexpress
Senior Member
Why are we assuming that shunt enhancers are required? Nearly every other railway on the planet manages to detect small trains just fine without shunt enhancers. The issue is specifically with a few models of level crossing gates that CN chose to install. Via's 24-axle trains meet Transport Canada's requirements for electrical conductivity, so TC needs to do their job and tell CN to make the necessary adjustments to their level crossing equipment to detect trains reliably.
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Urban Sky
Senior Member
Because we don’t have a rail regulator which actually acts like one and sets minimum standards for what host railroads may or may not install and what kind of rolling stock they have to safely detect at what speeds. Red tape comes at a price, but sometimes the lack of red tape comes at an even higher price, at least to the general public…
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dowlingm
Senior Member
If it was as simple as saying “yank that gear and put in ones that work better” why haven’t Amtrak and VIA gone to the STB and TC to demand CN and BNSF do so? Presumably that is a worse option, either because they know the railroads will get a decade or more to do so, that the railroads might decide to decrease zone speeds to narrow the gap between passenger and freight, or something else
Trackside_Treasure
Active Member
Re: Replacing Heritage - VIA has already cancelled some runs due to transitioning between equipment types, according to VIA. However, some of these were non-daily trains and/or Ventures that continually could not make their departure time due to an incoming Venture running continually late. So the absolute number of train runs that the ordered Ventures were to replace has already decreased.
Re: Onboard Shunt Enhancers - unfortunately, it's not as if we go to Partsource, buy them and bolt them on. The exemption for above-rail-height mounting in the U.S. would likely be more fraught in Canada with any ice/snow buildup near the railhead. I would guess that the design/testing/installation/approval/implementation steps would take as long as ordering more Venture cars,(which most rail enthusiasts seem to really, really want) but would likely be more palatable to government budget approval process using CN (and VIA's) claims of ensuring public safety.
The winner of the Glacially Slow Rail Passenger Progress Award is a tie! Half to VIA for taking ten months to finally start making some changes like J-trains, XS and XL consists, getting CN to give a little on its unreasonable demands as the rail infrastructure owner, and finally getting some chutzpah when it comes to remarshalling. Once CN gets its Permanent Slow Order signs up (which in itself apparently takes multi-agency approval) I doubt they'll be coming down. UNLESS....the other half of the award, Transport Canada (Go TC, go TC!) comes out of its ivory tower of no regulation and uses the data CN has supplied to prove there is no loss-of-shunt problem in the first place.
In the meantime, CN is happy, VIA is stymied, passengers are dissatisfied, and we all scramble around napkin-sketching ways to fix this mess. But at least we have shiny, new trains
Re: Onboard Shunt Enhancers - unfortunately, it's not as if we go to Partsource, buy them and bolt them on. The exemption for above-rail-height mounting in the U.S. would likely be more fraught in Canada with any ice/snow buildup near the railhead. I would guess that the design/testing/installation/approval/implementation steps would take as long as ordering more Venture cars,(which most rail enthusiasts seem to really, really want) but would likely be more palatable to government budget approval process using CN (and VIA's) claims of ensuring public safety.
The winner of the Glacially Slow Rail Passenger Progress Award is a tie! Half to VIA for taking ten months to finally start making some changes like J-trains, XS and XL consists, getting CN to give a little on its unreasonable demands as the rail infrastructure owner, and finally getting some chutzpah when it comes to remarshalling. Once CN gets its Permanent Slow Order signs up (which in itself apparently takes multi-agency approval) I doubt they'll be coming down. UNLESS....the other half of the award, Transport Canada (Go TC, go TC!) comes out of its ivory tower of no regulation and uses the data CN has supplied to prove there is no loss-of-shunt problem in the first place.
In the meantime, CN is happy, VIA is stymied, passengers are dissatisfied, and we all scramble around napkin-sketching ways to fix this mess. But at least we have shiny, new trains
dowlingm
Senior Member
In principle I agree that we shouldn’t underestimate the initial and ongoing cost in time and money of adding shunt enhancement, but given ground zero for Amtrak’s need is the Chicago area it’s not like VIA will be figuring winter issues out alone either. If both agencies can demonstrate that on an ongoing basis, train based shunt enhancement is overly onerous, maybe that finally gets the regulators moving in a way the current uncertainty doesn’t.
Krypto98
Active Member
I saw the V4 document and it mostly has do not exceed 60/70 mph until crossings occupied on specific crossings
I don't see any new pso speeds on the Dundas, Strathroy and Kingston (most of it except 1 or 2 closer to Montreal), Montreal and St hyacinthe had like 1 pso added as well.
Drummondville sub got the most PSOs added.
Chatham sub also got some pso zones added
Guelph, Halton and York sub remain 103.1f
It's probably very unlikely they add pso signs for most of the subs except the Drummondville which got like 8-10 new psos.