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Moose Rail (National Capital Region)

kEiThZ said:
Overlap would be great. But I'm not sure there's enough capacity for it, even if twin tracked. It all depends on how many LRT branches Gatineau wants crossing the river. Ultimately though, it's pretty obvious that Trillium to Gatineau transfers would the smallest proportion out of Confederation to Gatineau and Gatineau to Ottawa transfers. So if choices have to be made, I fail to see why forcing Confederation Line and STO riders to transfer twice makes more sense. Trillium Line riders face the exact same number of transfers on either side of the river. The only difference is that they could arguably walk to their destination. And even this is debatable with every map I've ever seen showing a connection at Tache-UQO. In any event, that's some to discuss when the time comes and once Gatineau has something more first to discuss.
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Yes, it would certainly be creating somewhat of a pinch point, but there are ways to avoid that. For example, during peak only sending every 2nd Trillium Line train over the bridge. There are tonnes of routing options with respect to the Gatineau LRT too, that I'm sure something can be figured out that would work. At the end of the day though, the end goal should be this:

1) Direct access from the Gatineau LRT system to the Confederation Line (i.e. no Gatineau LRT > Trillium Line > Confederation Line double transfer required)
2) Direct Trillium Line access to the Federal cluster in Hull (PDP & Les Terrasses)
 
gweed123 said:
Direct Trillium Line access to the Federal cluster in Hull (PDP & Les Terrasses)
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Why this has to be a goal is beyond me. It’s not like we built LRT right to the Carling campus with thousands of personnel who work there. Why these two public servant hovels are particularly important is beyond me. Sure, if they can be served as a matter of course, great. But short of building a station beside Zibi, that is a 1 km walk from Tache. Putting them on the Gatineau LRT makes more sense.

Using the spur near Zibi means bypassing UQO and the Rapibus at Tache. Why this is necessary or acceptable to serve two of many federal buildings is puzzling.
 
gweed123 said:
Yes, it would certainly be creating somewhat of a pinch point, but there are ways to avoid that. For example, during peak only sending every 2nd Trillium Line train over the bridge. There are tonnes of routing options with respect to the Gatineau LRT too, that I'm sure something can be figured out that would work. At the end of the day though, the end goal should be this:

1) Direct access from the Gatineau LRT system to the Confederation Line (i.e. no Gatineau LRT > Trillium Line > Confederation Line double transfer required)
2) Direct Trillium Line access to the Federal cluster in Hull (PDP & Les Terrasses)
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Something that intrigues me, relevant to an earlier point you made on twinning or cantilevering the PoW Bridge, is the space available to double deck the present structure, akin to what Vancouver did in the old CPR tunnel. This would either require the addition of of third rail shoes...or battery packs (a much more desirable option) to clear LRVs or EMUs with pantographs lowered.

In Van's case, I believe they had to lower the floor in the tunnel to get the height needed.

There is another option available, and space was built at inception of the bridge, and that's a passing loop mid-point on the island. Switches wouldn't be necessary to do this as there's enough width available to use gauntlet tracks and the mid-point and end points would avoid the need for switches. This would of course allow full height catenary to be used. Transit time to clear each section of bridge can't be that great, and certainly well within the timetable proposed for the foreseeable future.
 
kEiThZ said:
Why this has to be a goal is beyond me. It’s not like we built LRT right to the Carling campus with thousands of personnel who work there. Why these two public servant hovels are particularly important is beyond me. Sure, if they can be served as a matter of course, great. But short of building a station beside Zibi, that is a 1 km walk from Tache. Putting them on the Gatineau LRT makes more sense.

Using the spur near Zibi means bypassing UQO and the Rapibus at Tache. Why this is necessary or acceptable to serve two of many federal buildings is puzzling.
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But the Carling Campus will be an easy shuttle bus away, down an uncongested suburban road, from the future Moodie Station. In that case, there's no reason to build LRT directly to the campus.

PDP & La Chaudiere house literally thousands of workers, many of them coming from Ottawa (since working for the Feds you don't have much of a say in which side of the river your department's office is on).

And the Gatineau LRT is more likely to have one branch coming from the west and going over the river, and one branch coming from the west and continuing straight to the PDP area. The Gatineau LRT is unlikely to serve a direct connection between Bayview and PDP, meaning there will be one transfer on the Ottawa side, and another on the Gatineau side.

With respect to Tache and UQO, that can be addressed by extending Rapidbus for another stop and building a new station closer to the river, with a walking path to UQO. And with respect to UQO specifically, there aren't very many people who go to that school who live in Ontario to begin with, so I don't think that's a high volume trip pattern.
 
gweed123 said:
But the Carling Campus will be an easy shuttle bus away, down an uncongested suburban road, from the future Moodie Station. In that case, there's no reason to build LRT directly to the campus.
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My point was that we don't build transit just to target workers in a campus. If we did that, we'd build the LRT right to the Carling campus. At full build out, it'll have almost as many military and civilian personnel as Terrasses and Portage.

gweed123 said:
PDP & La Chaudiere house literally thousands of workers, many of them coming from Ottawa (since working for the Feds you don't have much of a say in which side of the river your department's office is on).
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I know that. I used to work right by those buildings. My point here is that you build a network, not a pipeline for federal workers at two locations. They really aren't special. There's just as many workers commuting to Louis St-Laurent and the national printing bureau and several other federal campuses on the Quebec side. We need to think of all those transfers too.

gweed123 said:
And the Gatineau LRT is more likely to have one branch coming from the west and going over the river, and one branch coming from the west and continuing straight to the PDP area. The Gatineau LRT is unlikely to serve a direct connection between Bayview and PDP, meaning there will be one transfer on the Ottawa side, and another on the Gatineau side.

With respect to Tache and UQO, that can be addressed by extending Rapidbus for another stop and building a new station closer to the river, with a walking path to UQO. And with respect to UQO specifically, there aren't very many people who go to that school who live in Ontario to begin with, so I don't think that's a high volume trip pattern.
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This is a very Ottawa centric point of view. And one that is predicated on Gatineau being willing to change their network, all for a Trillium Line stop near Terrasses. If there's capacity and it can be done cheaply, it may be supportable. If it's anything more than a few million, it's not defensible. When those folks can just jump on Gatineau's LRT.

In any event, until we get an actual service concept, this is not really debatable. Far too amorphous right now.
 
Long time viewer first time posted wrote their thoughts on Moose in this post here in Skyscraper.com:

So after 7 years of watching this whole Moose ordeal I couldn’t hold back anymore and had to leave a few thoughts about it.

I’ll start out by saying that there are at least a dozen reasons why Moose will fail, but I am not going to focus on the ones specific to the Moose plan, just the ones about commuter rail in general. And I don’t have anything against commuter rail, or a private commuter rail company. In fact I think both could/will be a good thing for the NCR in the near future. But right now, commuter rail doesn’t make sense, and it will take a few, pretty major projects, and important realizations, before the moment is right for it.

1. The Trillium line ROW is far too valuable as an LRT line to be given up, or even slightly compromised, for commuter rail.

No LRT line in Ottawa is going to spur as much high density, urban, development as the Trillium Line. Yes, the Confederation line will go through Hintonburg, Tunneys Pasture [sic], Westboro, etc. But these are all pretty well established neighbourhoods that are also somewhat resistant to change which means there is going to be a slow burn of new development (I also know that Lebreton Flats is the exception along that line). The change along many sections of the Trillium Line, however, will be fast and massive in scale.

The Trillium Line runs through a big part of Ottawa’s industrial history, which means there are now a lot of brownfields, and under-utilized urban areas, that are ready for development. If you follow even the first section of the line from Bayview to Carling you can see the vein of urbanity that it is going to be created, even when you only take into account the projects under construction or proposed today, let alone what else comes online in the next 5 to 10 years. (The re-development potential around Walkley, Greensboro, and South Keys, and connections to Carelton [sic] University, and the airport are also valuable aspects of the line). This corridor of growth is critical to Ottawa, and its because this corridor is being connected by an LRT line, providing fast local transit service, that connects it to downtown and other neighbourhoods, that this growth is, and will continue to take place. Commuter rail would just bypass most of these places, and have a frequency that would make it a pointless option. If anything put into jeopardy the future of a Trillium Line that was equivalent to the Confederation Line, you would see development arrested along it very quickly.

Yes, the city is doing its usual thing where they debate and discuss and consult for what seems like forever. But, they will also likely do their usual thing of one day getting it together and putting together a proper LRT plan for Trillium Line which will send development flying. The city knows how valuable the line is to urban development and the transportation network of the city, and there is not a chance they are going to let it be compromised in the slightest. Commuter rail on this line, in any shape or form, is a non-starter.

2. Ottawas rail network in the more central parts of the city is rubbish and totally unsuitable for commuter rail

As it stands right now Ottawa only has two rail stations. One at the cities edge in Barrhaven, and Tremblay, a central station which is a final destination for nobody. There are no rail connections to Gatineau (a sizeable, underserved population). And there is no rail station downtown.

Even if the city decided that the Trillium line wasn’t all that important (which it is), you still have a constrained line which doesn’t go downtown (Bayview is kind of close, but not really). While it would serve Gatineau, the same problem exists on that side of the river in that it would skirt around the downtown area.

The only reason the existing rail network kind of works is because intercity VIA travel brings in different people/travellers. Its not a big deal to have to carry on a while after your journey to the train station if you are coming for a few days, or you’ve already been travelling for a few hours, or more. But commuting is different. You do it every single weekday, almost every week of the year, and minutes matter. Most people don’t take commuter rail because they just really like trains, or want to virtue signal that they care about the environment and sustainable development and all sorts of other things (those people are going to buy a Tesla to do that). People take it because it’s a faster commute, or cheaper, or some combination of those and other very practical factors. A commuter rail network that feeds into Tremblay is going to provide those benefits to very few people.

3. Like LRT, building a proper, modern commuter rail network is going to be very, very expensive, when the time is actually right for commuter rail

Everyone here likely remembers the debates surrounding upgrading the Transitway to LRT in the early 2000’s. The cost was high, which scared a lot of people off. This lead to a “compromise/more affordable” plan that had LRT running on surface streets through downtown Ottawa, instead of in a tunnel. Luckily that was killed off, because for obvious reasons that would have been stupid. Since then LRT has pushed forward with a plan that is modern, and doesn’t make any tradeoffs. Yes, it means it is a lot more expensive, but for a city that is continuing to grow, and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future, it is the only way.

Commuter rail is the exact same. When the time is right for commuter rail (more on this below), it will be part of a very costly endeavour to actually serve central Ottawa and Gatineau with proper rail connections. This means tunnels, downtown stations, electrification, etc. It will allow the Gatineau side to finally have access to passenger and commuter rail services. It will involve the cooperation of two cities, two provinces, the federal government, and the NCC.

In short, it will likely be one of the biggest engineering projects the NCR has seen. And it won’t be commuter rail to Wakefield or Arnprior that fuels it. It will be intercity passenger rail that does. Which will also mean that when commuter rail does start to take shape, it could well be VIA providing the first commuter services along its existing lines. Then, communities that are on older rail lines, lines that will need additional capital investment to, most likely rebuild or heavily, upgrade to modern standards can be explored as potential places to expand commuter rail too.

But this is all decades out. Commuter rail needs to grow on the backbone of a strong intercity rail network, and Ottawa doesn’t have that right now, nor is it in the cards at the moment.

………….


Ottawa is a city in transition. Think about how different parts of the city will look when someone in 2023 is looking back to what it was in 2013. LRT will have 2 phases of construction done, and become a ubiquitous part of how people travel around parts of Ottawa. You will have all the urban development undertaken as part of the Zibi and Lebreton projects, construction along the Trillium Line, especially from Bayview to Dows Lake, and all the urban development in existing neighbourhoods. Ottawa is at a crossroads where it is becoming a big city. This is exciting because big thinkers can contribute forward thinking ideas that will help the city move grow in positive ways. But like any city in transition, timing can be tough to judge, and sometimes the big ideas being tossed around aren’t quite ready for primetime. Commuter rail is one of those ideas.

Ultimately Moose will fail because even a well backed, government subsidized commuter rail service wouldn’t succeed if it was launched on the existing rail network. What is needed for anyone to have a chance to succeed are massive, government funded, capital investments in new infrastructure to bring a modern rail network to the central part of Ottawa and into Gatineau.

I genuinely think that in the next 5 to 10 years intercity rail (aka VIA rail in the Quebec-Windsor corridor), will be a topic that isn’t just vaguely discussed when it gets close to Federal elections. Modernizing that corridor is around the corner (again, it took time for investing in it to make sense, and that time is almost here). And in the Ottawa context this will fuel regional governments to look at how that could help Ottawa and Gatineau, especially when it comes to dealing with the challenging subject of interprovincial commuting and travelling in the NCR.

I like Moose for trying something different. But it’s dead in the water. It might have hd [sic] a small chance of working with Ottawas thinking 10 or 20 years ago, but not todays Ottawa.
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That's a great and poignant post. My only quibble is that I don't think Ottawa has ever needed commuter rail. Again, these towns can't even really sustain bus service.

That poster makes a fantastic point though. The Trillium corridor is primed to be developed.
 
^ Also, someone else posted these maps:

Originally Posted by OCCheetos
I forked the map I made for O Train fans and made a version with the MOOSE lines and stations added to it. It's a bit more visually appealing I guess?
It also meant that I could add actual circles to represent the 800m radius areas around stations instead of my crude and inaccurate hand-drawn circles from before... (Version with circles)

@Joseph Potvin feel free to use it and embed it on your website or something.. (it's MIT licensed).
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The issue of the "Certificate of Fitness" came up a few months ago. Joseph responded in the other forum so I thought I'd post it here.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Allandale25
So would that be Moose's next step if the court rules in favour of Moose over the City of Ottawa? They then have to become a federally regulated railway? Is this where the Certificate of Fitness comes in that Moose would need? I think we've covered this in the past where it's been pointed out that Moose could use a third party contractor, like Cando who already operate some short lines, but Joseph has said they want to keep it in house.

I wonder if that position will change given how long the court proceedings are occurring and given Stage Two continues to progress.

OCCheetos:

No. MOOSE seems to intend to apply for a certificate... now? according to their timeline in the brochure (@Joseph Potvin is that happening?). At some point, presumably after the court rules, they'll obtain funding for a feasibility study. Only once that is complete would MOOSE enter actual negotiations with the city for track rights (although they'd be in contact during the study I'm sure).
That's oversimplified of course^.

MOOSE still wants to contract out operations, but MOOSE would be the "railway". Similar to how GO trains are operated by Bombardier, but GO is still the railway.
IIRC Potvin suggested that the city could (assuming the city was interested) end up being one of the operators that operations are contracted out to. Of course, there are plenty of other groups to contract out to as well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Joseph Potvin
We did apply in 2016, with one of world's largest insurance companies as our insurer-of-record, and a reasonable degree of legal advice (for a start-up) on the working premise that Section 91 of the Canada Transportation Act meant what it says. I won't get into all the Kafkaesque nature of the actual process here, but suffice to say, Agency staff have constructed a logically insurmountable wall that prevents any genuine start-ups from entering this industry. If we had endless time and resources we'd be taking the Agency itself to Federal Court on a Writ of Mandamus. As an economist and as a Canadian, I'm appalled at the barriers to entry they have created, not just for MOOSE, but for any market entrant. So yes, MOOSE did intend to apply for a certificate of fitness, because we meet all the criteria established in the letter and intent of the law. Yes we have written formally to the Minister as well as the Agency to explain the logical barriers in place that contradict Section 5 of the Act. That's all "off topic" for this forum though. The only way for any start-up to proceed in Canadian rail is to team up with an incumbent railway operator. So that's what MOOSE will do.

The court and the Minister's decisions affect some aspects of our next steps but our plans accommodate all the court outcomes. Also we're past the feasibility study per se -- we're on track towards implementation. Sorry, though, there's only so much I can say on this forum.
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I responded with:

Thanks OC and Joseph. That's helpful information on where Moose is at now, and a good update on the Certificate of Fitness issue. Also, I don't think that this issue is off-topic (Joseph: "That's all "off topic" for this forum though. The only way for any start-up to proceed in Canadian rail is to team up with an incumbent railway operator. So that's what MOOSE will do.")

Do we have any sense of when the court will rule? And just to remind me, there's only one main court proceeding right now right? In other words, there aren't multiple court cases, right?
 
Allandale25 said:
How does this news impact what Moose wants to do?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/otta...BFwOpt3gVgvR83SmQLekLWGlUlBDV6M-O5v9DpPfqtQ68
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It makes far more sense to me to extend the O-Train into Gatineau.

That way, the bridge and infrastructure would continue to be heavy rail, and the only thing impacting Moose would be fitting their operations inbetween the O-Train schedule.

However thats not why I think the O-Train should be extended into Gatineau. It just makes more sense for a bunch of other reasons. Less transfers at an already busy Rideau/Bayview station, the O-Train could be extended right into the heart of Gatineau, and it makes sense for the O-Train Trillium Line to be converted into a more regional transit system with their extensions South already planned.
 
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