Question,
@smallspy
I've previously heard that Lambton/West Toronto was closing and land sold for development, only to see it hold on and sometimes see active use again...........
I also understand that Harrison ordered Yard C (72 tracks) at Agincourt closed.
Do you know what the current plans are for either facility?
That's the funny things about plans on the railroad: they frequently don't go as planned....
The joint Lambton/West Toronto facility has been planned to be closed for as long as Agincourt has been open. Every time a new plan gets drawn up, something happens and it all gets blown up to be tried again in some slightly different manner.
Paul, feel free to correct me on this as you actually live in the area and know the operations there better than I, but I seem to recall that technically West Toronto has been closed as an operating facility at least twice. And both times, the closure lasted less than 6 months before it was realized that the railroad needed the facility to keep running in order to keep their own operations fluid.
As for Yard C, a lot of the yard has been torn up, yes. And more importantly, the hump has been razed. But they've also put back in a bunch of the tracks at the north end that they'd already torn out because they realized that they needed the capacity.
And ultimately, this is the take-away from the whole thing: a lot of these "modern" plans that keep cropping up - and I'm going to use "modern" as a term to ascribe to any of the type of plan created by the followers of EHH and his ilk - is that they count on the railroad operating at 90% efficiency and perfection 100% of the time. And the fact of the matter is that the industry, for all of its attempts to do so is that it simply is not capable of operating at those kinds of levels for sustained periods. Yes, some of those reasons are external to the railways such as weather, but a lot of them are internal and can be solely chalked up to lack of investment, or in extreme cases shareholder interference. EHH's much-bandied Precision Scheduled Railroading was dependent on motive power having 100% availability and 95% reliability, on crews always being on time and ready to work, on storage requirements throughout the network being minimal and forcused on specific locations, and with car storage limited to weeks at a time rather than months, and perhaps most importantly, on the receiving railroads always being ready to take the cars that they are owed. If any of those points fails to meet that expectation, the whole system breaks down because its operating under the expectation that trains almost never stop, and that cars don't need sit and wait for their next load. Fluidity became the buzzword, and therefore measure, by which to calculate the whole thing. And what's been shown time and time again is that's simply not a reasonable expectation, and that's why the railways that have been successful in the long-term after the implementation of PSR (as opposed to the short-term success following the implementation of PSR - which to date, is CN, CPR, CSX and NS, in order) have kept a lot of the same plans and programs, but dialed back the expectations ever so slightly AND spent a more on things like maintenance that end up being the linchpin to the whole scheme.
Dan
