Awesome model. (as usual). One nitpick would be, I would assume at least two minutes between when a enters the triple track and when a following express can arrive behind it, partly to add timekeeping contingency but also to protect against lag in the signalling. But that's a minor tweak.
I did assume at least two minutes between trains, in fact I assumed at least three. Keep in mind that the time shown for stopping trains is the departure time, so for example the train shown departing Maple at 08:04 actually arrived there at 08:02.
I have lost track - did ML decide that the turnback point for some trains would be Newmarket and not Aurora?
I'm honestly not sure where the turnback points are planned nowadays but I do recall them moving one of them to Bradford at some point.
I put the second turnback point at Mulock because it allows the Regional service to skip Mulock. If the short-turn happened at Aurora, the Regional would need to serve Mulock to meet the '15 minute service to Bradford' promise. But Aurora would definitely be an option as well, and I recall seeing some station drawings that did include a turnback track. I don't think Newmarket would be a good choice because there's no room for a third track at the station, so at that point you might as well turn back at East Gwillimbury.
Yes, it was really only the segment south of Lawrence that I was thinking of when I raised land costs.
Yeah I don't see any triple track happening south of Lawrence, not just due to space/infra constraints but also because even the express trains would presumably be making at least a few stops to connect people from the northern edges of the line to various subway services.
There is enough work getting done at the moment that it's clear that no triple track is going in at this moment and there are places where it isn't being roughed in at all. In fact, even the doubling still seems fairly piecemeal in places. But it's cool to appreciate what may become possible down the road.
Yeah for sure. This is not a 'current track construction' kind of scenario it's just a 'sanity-check of future-proofing' scenario. I was just confirming that it's not crazy to have omitted the provisions for third track at Snider Diamond and Davenport Diamond, while still future-proofing for triple track at Downsview Park, Maple, and Rutherford stations. Based on this timetable, triple tracking King City would also make the overtake more reliable, so ideally that should be future-proofed as well as part of the current second platform construction, just as it was at Rutherford and Maple.
The current track construction goal should be (and presumably is) to get full double track to Aurora with intermittent passing tracks every 15 minutes along the line further north, which would allow half-hourly local service to Aurora and hourly off-peak express to Barrie, increasing to half-hourly during peak periods. Then my priority would be to extend the double track further northward until Bradford. It would be at least a decade before it's time to come back and install an overtaking segment south of Aurora.
