nfitz
Superstar
You've nailed it. You can see what the finished truss will look like in the picture above. Looks like there's a small piece still to go on the end. Might not be structural ...
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GO Transit: Union Station Shed Replacement & Track Upgrades (Zeidler)
Hipster Duck
Senior Member
The more I think about it, the more it really pains me that the Bush shed wasn't taken down. Not because I have some vendetta against "heritage" structures*, but because the column placement of the Bush shed will forever prohibit the design of platforms that are useful for regional rail, as opposed to commuter rail, operation. The short spacing between columns means that we have two small platforms, with very bad people circulation properties, per track, rather than one wide platform that serves two tracks on either side. As it is now, the train has to dwell in the station and allow exiting passengers to leave on one platform, and then wait to open the other side for entraining passengers. In most European cities, the doors of the S-bahn just open and there is enough platform space for people to wait on the platform and let exiting passengers pass through (like a subway platform). The width of the platform also accommodates wider stairwells with enough area to move around the stairwell, if necessary. Right now, the area on either side of the stairwell on a Union station platform is claustrophobic and, frankly, dangerous.
*I also fail to see how the Bush shed has any heritage merit. For starters, there is a bigger, more elaborate Bush structure in the Jersey City rail terminal. If we want a home grown example, there is one in Winnipeg that isn't going anywhere soon. There are even modern examples, like Chicago's Ogilvy station. I also think that while history is important, it has to be purposeful. If a historic structure cannot be repurposed to suit contemporary needs and, worse, denigrates the experience as the Bush shed does, then it shouldn't be preserved. The Bush shed was built to accommodate the low capacity intercity travel needs for a city of 500,000 with steam locomotives. It is ill-suited for the high capacity regional travel needs of a city of 6 million in the 2000s. Keeping the Bush shed and retrofitting the station around it is as asinine as rebuilding Pearson airport so that people would be boarding A380s and 777s by walking across the tarmac and ascending up a stair car.
*I also fail to see how the Bush shed has any heritage merit. For starters, there is a bigger, more elaborate Bush structure in the Jersey City rail terminal. If we want a home grown example, there is one in Winnipeg that isn't going anywhere soon. There are even modern examples, like Chicago's Ogilvy station. I also think that while history is important, it has to be purposeful. If a historic structure cannot be repurposed to suit contemporary needs and, worse, denigrates the experience as the Bush shed does, then it shouldn't be preserved. The Bush shed was built to accommodate the low capacity intercity travel needs for a city of 500,000 with steam locomotives. It is ill-suited for the high capacity regional travel needs of a city of 6 million in the 2000s. Keeping the Bush shed and retrofitting the station around it is as asinine as rebuilding Pearson airport so that people would be boarding A380s and 777s by walking across the tarmac and ascending up a stair car.
I agree completely. I'd much rather have a wide open space where the platforms can be designed for what works best, and not be limited to where the supports are. Save the heritage preservation for the terminal itself, and let the train shed be modern. It's an eyesore now, and even when you look at historical pictures of it, it was an eyesore back then too.
Voltz
Senior Member
The train shed is not limiting the layout of the tracks and the platforms as much as the support piers for the tracks are, they can not be moved so the tracks are stuck where they are, the only thing that can be done to increase platform size is to remove tracks.
CapitalSeven
Senior Member
However it's not the shed that constrains the placement of the platforms. It's the columns that hold the whole station up. It's virtually impossible to move them without tearing down the whole structure and rebuilding. (Whether that ought to have been done instead of the current project is another - valid - discussion). The current lowering of the floor level is hard enough, and is taking years even without moving the platforms.
AlbertC
Superstar
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...other-jewel-in-torontos-crown/article2310330/
Union Station remake aims to be another jewel in Toronto’s crown
IAN HARVEY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 9:21PM EST
Union Station remake aims to be another jewel in Toronto’s crown
IAN HARVEY
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 9:21PM EST
k10ery
Senior Member
Folks in the Globe comment thread seem to hate the atrium. (But they seem to hate everything, including each other.)
Hipster Duck
Senior Member
(1) I never even thought about the fact that it's the concrete columns that support the track floor that determines where tracks are placed, but you are absolutely right. Thanks for alerting me to this.
(2) And, as you said, we are already spending hundreds of millions and a couple of years to hold up the existing track floor from underneath, and dig out a sub-basement. We are going this far, so why didn't we go a little further and reorient the giant support columns so that we could have a more efficient track layout.?
A proper track layout would have been one that supports the transportation needs of a metropolis in 2012, where hundreds of regional trains have to move in and out of a station quickly to shunt hundreds of thousands of commuters to all points of the region. Instead, we will still rely on the track layout that served the travel needs of a city of barely 1/10th the size in 1912, where a steam locomotive drawing a fleet of pullman coaches sat on the track for hours as the steamer trunks of Edwardian ladies and gentlemen got loaded onto the baggage car.
When I think about it, this city is awash in mistakes like these. Projects that commit all of the money and manpower to do something truly revolutionary but just end up reinforcing previous bad habits that have to be corrected generations down the road.
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whatever
Senior Member
Given the enormous amount of work going into the excavation process, I wonder what the incremental cost would have been to dig out another 30 feet of soil to leave room for a future track level. I'm sure it wouldn't have been cheap, but given all of the reinforcing work that's already had to be done for the sub-basement I wonder if that's the kind of thing that a future generation is going to hate us for not doing
smallspy
Senior Member
There isn't another 30 feet of soil below the dig-down. Bedrock is within a couple of feet of the finally excavaged depth.
Dan
Toronto, Ont.
Platform 27
Active Member
In the case of Union Station, I think we're forgetting that the projects that we're seeing under construction now---both the GO work on the train shed, the minor current changes to track layout, and the City's sub-basement plan---were largely nailed down in terms of project scale and basic design some years ago, in the 2002-2005ish period. (The first post in this thread, dating from when this was mostly a done deal, is from 2006(!)). Adding to the mess, recall that the underground reno idea was put together by a P3, the P3 went belly up, the project went into limbo, and then the City put together something similar itself later, and all the while GO had to come up with a train shed plan that worked whether there was to be underground work or not.
In that time period, the plans probably looked quite generously future-proofed for what was seen as realistic expansion of GO over the next 30-40 years. It was only around 2008 when The Big Move came together that we saw the ambition level really get cranked up for the future, with ridership targets dialled way up and S-bahn/RER-type options now a real part of conversation.
I guess it's a fair question as to whether someone should have immediately slammed on the brakes on the existing Union Station plans back in 2009 and ordered everything--the column cuts, the trainshed, the track layout--back to the drawing board. You're right that our children might well hate us for blowing the opportunity, but if I put myself in the shoes of those decision-makers then, coming off such a complicated project history to date and looking at a very real capacity crunch on the station already, I can see why pushing the completion date even further into future (and likely massively increasing the budget) mightn't have looked too appealing.
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Nick.
Banned
Platform 27
Active Member
^compare the above photo with...
...and I think we can conclude there's probably a small outstanding piece of steel--maybe a north-south truss that ties the whole roof together--to go onto the west end.
Thinking there should still be some cantilevered sections on the E/W sides:
...and I think we can conclude there's probably a small outstanding piece of steel--maybe a north-south truss that ties the whole roof together--to go onto the west end.
Agreed on all accounts. And thanks to Voltz and CapitalSeven for pointing out the track configuration issue with the footings. I hadn't considered that (probably because I'm a planner and not an engineer, haha. We think of ideas and then it's the engineers' job to tell us why it won't work
).EnviroTO
Senior Member
But what would this more efficient track layout look like? It seems the station is constrained both in number of tracks and width of platforms. When you reorient things you end up taking space from one and giving it to the other. I'm not sure that the cost of moving all the supports to somewhere else would end up substantially different from what is there now.