Recent content by CapitalSeven

Kind of have to raise a caveat here. Platform screen doors have been costed out at a million dollars a door to retrofit lines 1 and 2 I think. One struggles to see how each 6 metres of sliding door costs 3 times as much as a Rolls of the same length, but I was shouted down when I questioned...

There is no real need to widen the bridge in the future. It's already five tracks wide. With the OL on the rail embankment, there is no practical to put in more than four tracks for GO, VIA and ALTO. So yes, as others have pointed out, GO is in the process of building a bottleneck just as...

Correct. Connections to YUL would be useful to people in both Ottawa and Quebec city. Connections to Pearson via HSR are less obvious. Peterborough yes, but people in Ottawa, I can assure you, don't want a multi-billion dollar system to get them to Pearson. They want a multi-billion dollar...

Yes, the existing tunnel to the platforms could be extended, but VIA controls access to it. You could extend it to the eastbound LRT platform and put a fare gate there, but as I noted, riders arriving from the east or going downtown would still need to go up and down again somewhere or other...

There are a number of white bar signals in Ottawa, used for transit priority/queue jump situations. There's one at Albert and Lyon to allow buses on a one-way street to pull away from the curb beside the LRT station and make it into the left-turn lane to another one-way street. Using the bar...

That doesn't really make much sense, although it could be done. All VIA passengers are at grade level, and the fare gates are as well. They would have to go down to a seemingly non-existent basement, walk 300 feet, then go back up to the fare gates, then down again to the platform. Is it...

The elevated approach is feasible. A tunnel would take almost exactly the same route. Anyone care to Photoshop an elevated guide-way and portal into some of the tourist-promo photos of skating on this UNESCO heritage site? I lack the skills. It would go more or less where the trees are on the...

I do sort of wonder what will happen to that VIA track post-HSR. By 2040 some sort of regional line between Alexandria and Ottawa with more stops could be viable. I'm not saying the 🫎 word.

I remain skeptical about the southerly route. From Smith's Falls down there is an abandoned line, now a trail, which wasn't too bad and parts of which might serve with straightening. Running east from Peterborough, the previous railway looked like this: If you want to lay out a HSR route in...

This map, happily included above by Northern Light, shows the tempting possibilities of the hydro corridors for high speeds. The branch through Almonte and Merivale passes through mid-Ottawa in an almost straight line. Despite the almost carte-blanche swath indicated in the maps, the corridor...

The Schabas document is interesting. I don't think his "optimized" spine and branches plan has that much to recommend it, but it does resemble what some of the European lines do. It's nearly all greenfield and new corridors between Toronto and the Quebec border, and I just don't think the feds...

As noted, the Winchester Subdivision came into play in the late-HFR era when it became apparent running through Ottawa would make Toronto-Montreal times very long, but that was when conventional track and speeds were involved, and using most of the VIA ROW was assumed. It’s a complete different...

There's a bypass route through Ottawa that would save 5 km but it would cost hundreds of millions to upgrade it. I suspect it means coast thru Ottawa Union at 80 kph and save the 10 minutes or so a stop involves. As for Peterborough, I think they are going to have to listen carefully to the...

The problem isn't streetcLRarTs, the problem is Toronto. This is this city that declared "Transit First" on Queen's Quay 21 years ago, took 100 years to start the "relief line," made a train wreck of transit in Scarborough, and spent huge sums on new streetcars then undermined their use in...

He was such a non-entity, even those of us who were of voting age when he floated through have mostly forgotten him.