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GO Transit: Service thread (including extensions)

Here's my annual summary of Canadian commuter rail service:

Improvements since January 2020 in green, deteriorations in red.
ComRSum.JPG


Full writeup:
https://ontariotrafficman.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/canadian-commuter-rail-summary-2020/
Frequency
As you’d expect, every commuter rail line in the country has had its service reduced. For lines with frequent service, the cuts were drastic, typically eliminating half the service. On lines with less-frequent service, cuts were limited in order to maintain a functional base level of service. For the same reason, peak period service tended to be cut more severely than off-peak service. Lines which only had peak-period service therefore saw more significant reductions in service than lines with a similar number of trips spread throughout the day.


Speed
As commuter rail networks were cut back to their bare essentials, virtually all express service was cancelled. As a result, end-to-end travel times increased on the lines which previously had express service.

But the upside of drastically reduced ridership is that trains don’t need to dwell as long in stations. Furthermore, the reduced density of train traffic lowers the chance of delays spreading from one train to another. GO Transit has taken advantage of these conditions to shorten local train schedules by a few minutes on all lines.


The particularly large improvement on the Kitchener line is also due to ongoing railway upgrades between Kitchener and Georgetown.

Travel times along the Barrie line also were also helped by the closure of York University station.

Closure of the Deux-Montagnes line
In Montréal, the permanent closure of the Mont Royal tunnel to train traffic has reduced the Deux-Montagnes line to a shuttle service between Deux-Montagnes and Bois-Franc. Meanwhile, the Mascouche line now takes an enormous detour around the mountain, adding 40 minutes to the travel time. Although this technically increased line length considerably, I have not changed the length in the chart since it does not represent any increase in coverage.

On the 31st of December 2020, the rest of the Deux-Montagnes line will permanently close, to enable construction on the Réseau Électrique Métropolitain metro line which will replace it. The Deux-Montagnes line was the last remaining portion of the Canadian railway network to be electrified, so starting New Year’s day, Canada’s railway network will be 100% diesel-powered. This makes Canada the opposite of Switzerland, whose railway network is 100% electrified.

Metrolinx plans to electrify several railway lines in and around Toronto, so this situation should hopefully only last a few years.

Moving Forward
The current ridership slump is of course due to the stay-at-home measures which have eliminated the primary source of commuter rail ridership: travel between suburban houses and downtown offices, attractions and events. Once the pandemic is over, ridership will naturally increase again. The 2019 situation will represent a benchmark by which to measure the recovery over the next couple years.

But some travel patterns may never return to the way they were in 2019. Even prior to the pandemic, many office-based employers were cutting their real-estate expenditures by encouraging employees to work at least partially from home part time and reconfiguring offices to a co-working layout. Now that virtually all office workers have been set up to work from home, I would expect this trend to accelerate considerably, with many more people commuting 2 or 3 days per week.

If people commute less frequently, they will also be willing to live further from their workplace. So while the overall amount of commuter demand will almost certainly decrease, the amount of long-distance commuting may remain stable or even increase.

I also expect that off-peak ridership will become more important. Indeed GO Transit has reported that 61% of its ridership during the pandemic has been outside of rush hour, compared to only 39% in 2019. Of course travel pattern changes during the lockdown do not necessarily correspond to travel patterns in the future, but if my guesses are correct, this may represent an exaggerated picture of the travel pattern changes to come.

GO Transit is well-prepared for this likely shift in travel patterns. The GO Expansion program includes a heavy focus on off-peak and long-distance ridership. Of particular note is the plan for all-day express service from Toronto to destinations such as Hamilton and Kitchener, the former of which could begin as soon as next year.

The other two commuter rail operators have little to no off-peak service, and no comparable plans to introduce regular all-day service. They are therefore more vulnerable to changes in peak-period ridership.
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As of January 2021, the Exo Deux Montanges will not operate on any of its route, for RTM conversion. There will be bus replacement service until the north/west RTM branches open in 2023-2024.

I was really pleased with my decision to ride the entirety of the Mascouche Line in February while it was still running in the tunnel. My friend and I even got to stand in the cab on the return trip for a bit.
 
I really wish the kitchener line would just start their weekend train service already. The setup they have for the train buses feel terrible. One station i do feel bad for is the passengers that have Etobicoke North as their primary station. At least with most Toronto go stations, there is at least one or two corridors of any priority ttc variant serving nearby, while EN only has the kipling corridor (mostly just the 45 bus). It gets absolutely no go service (not even UP service for obvious reasons) during the weekends, thus making it a complete deadzone

As for the rest of the stations, malton and bramalea needs better weekend service. If there is still no weekend train service, but they extended that branch to downtown brampton, that would honestly work out a whole lot better tbh. They could try pushing every hour or at least 90 minutes going to guelph, while every 30-45 minutes going to georgetown depending on the guelph branch. Oh and of course, having the 30 bus running on weekends or make a new route that has a weekend like service to KW, preferably through Guelph and on highway 7 to Kitchener, but if that can’t happen then the same route we have for the 30 is just fine. But train service on weekends to bramalea or mount pleasant/georgetown is what i’d be hoping for to happen
 
^ It may indeed. Here's the only thing I can cite. It's the Railway Association of Canada's Rail Atlas where blue is CN and green is GO's ownership.

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crs1026 said:
^Why ML hasn’t fixed its trackage, I don’t know.... but the way the tracks are connected at Halwest, at present, even use of the Bramalea pocket track creates an interface with CN.

- Paul
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Well, yes and no.

Yes access to the south platform does interfere with the southernmost main track, but in practice there's not much reason for CN to ever use that track anyway, since it doesn't lead to the York Subdivision, and there are two other tracks to the north which do.

But the track configuration certainly does cause unnecessary conflict between eastbound and westbound GO trains, since there's only one track to the south of the main CN pair. It's quite a frustrating situation considering how Bramalea is a key turnback point for counter-peak service.

Here's a diagram I made a couple years ago showing the existing layout and its primary track users (not necessarily the track owners), as well as the modest change it would take to resolve the conflicts for counter-peak trains.
screen-shot-2019-02-08-at-19-33-00-png.173450


Here's the 2018 track layout in real life, with tracks highlighted:
Capture.JPG
 
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