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GO Transit Electrification | Metrolinx


"Electrification has a high capital cost, but batteries and hydrogen are unsuitable for long-distance high speed and freight services, which have higher energy needs than they can provide."

"The strategy recommends electrification of 11 700 track-km, battery operation on 400 km and hydrogen on 900 km. This leaves 2 400 km where there is no clear technical choice; further operational and economic analysis has recommended another 1 340 km of electrification, 400 km of battery operation and 400 km of hydrogen. No clear decision has yet been made on the remaining 260 km."

I am curious how they rank the battery option vs the hydrogen option. What are the pros and cons in this pair.
 
^Re questions about electrification timeline - as far as I can determine, electrification of GO lines remains as one item within the overall "On-Corridor" procurement. I haven't seen anything from ML bundling this out as a separate item. The little bits of new activity and information appear to me to be filling in gaps that have been identified in that overall procurement.

I will post some notes about that procurement in the GO Construction thread, I won't cross post them here.

If anyone knows different about how ML is advancing electrification, help ....?

- Paul
 
^Re questions about electrification timeline - as far as I can determine, electrification of GO lines remains as one item within the overall "On-Corridor" procurement. I haven't seen anything from ML bundling this out as a separate item.

The latest round of EAs needs to be finished before those details can be put into new tender packages. Bidders will not require much time to become familiar with the material this time around though; the changes aren't huge.
 
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^ No update in the latest Metrolink board report. It's in the RFP stage and I don't think the timeline has changed. They'll announce a winner in the spring of 2020 so we'll see if that holds.

For something this size I would assume at least a one year RFP timeline. So, they may get the bids back in May 2020 and then make a decision. Maybe the gov would need six months to make a decision and see if the bids have costs the gov is willing to live with? IE how close do the two bidders come to 13B

cc @cplchanb @ssiguy2

Update via @crs1026 in the post linked here (ignore the preview text):

 
Is there a price tag? Must be hundreds of billions.

Edit to clarify: for the UK rail electrification. Sorry for confusion below.
 
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^ If you check the latest Capital Projects Group report in the September Metrolinx board agenda I think there's a figure there. From what I remember it's around $14B.
 
You cannot draw any analogy between electrification in Britain and what Metrolinx has to deal with.

According to wikipedia as of 2019, 38% of the UK's rail system was electrified using catenary. It makes sense for further catenary electrification because many of the non-electrified routes will be able to "piggy back" onto the main electrified routes. It also means a lot of the maintenance, garage, sub-stations, and know-how are already in place whereas Metrolinx's only electric service is the light bulbs.

The term electrification has also become a loose one. A route maybe considered electrified because most of it is but the end of the routes can still be served by back-up batteries where they once couldn't have.

Either way, the longer this draws out {and we all know Metrolinx will be running late in the final announcement to say nothing of actually starting construction} the higher the chance these will be battery trains with contact-less charging at stations due to the much shorter construction times and having less disruption on the routes.

It will be interesting to see if Ottawa offers help if Toronto goes hydrogen as Ottawa is about to announce it's hydrogen policy and from all accounts it's going to be a really big plan to create a hydrogen economy. Ontario Hydro may also be pushing this behind the scenes as they {like Hydro Quebec} are trying to create their own hydrogen production thru electrolysis due to having an over supply of hydro at night.
 
Is there a price tag? Must be hundreds of billions.

Edit to clarify: for the UK rail electrification. Sorry for confusion below.

It's hard to put an accurate pricetag, as the network has been assembled piece-meal over the past 100 years (if you include the Southern's third-rail network).

As far as I can find, this is some of the costs for the bigger projects:
West Coast Main Line (1959 to 1974) - £705mil (costed in 2017) (also includes some minor signalling improvements)
East Coast Main Line (bulk of it was 1983 to 1989) - £345mil (costed in 1983)
Midland Main Line from London to Kettering (about 70 miles) was put into service last year at a cost of £260mil

That's not to say that British Governments haven't been skittish about the costs. The Great Western Main Line was supposed to be electrified all the way to Cardiff - the original plans called for the project to cost £500mil. As costs increased the project was cut back, so that the line is only electrified to Swindon - about 75 miles west of London.

Dan
 

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