Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Some Urban Trains

Fortunately, Toronto & Montreal had enough vision to plan & build 152.45m or 500 foot long subway & metro stations. Even Edmonton & Seattle have much longer underground train stations than the Vancouver-Richmond train or Canada+Line. The Vancouver C-Line is a fine example of congestive & inept planning and should be studied all around the world as a warning. It could be called the, FINANCIAL DRAINAGE LINE, or the, CATHETER LINE. That's because the ridiculous 50m stations aren't even quite a 3rd of the length of the 152.5m Montreal Metro trains & stations. Thus, it will be difficult to lengthen the very short stations.   

It's one thing if the C-Line was started off with absurdly, short 2.5 car trains, but at least the stations were already built to gradually accomodate 5 car trains. That would have been a reasonable attempt of planning for future capacity, but that's something BC just isn't that good at. The stations should have been designed to be ultimately accomodate 10 car trains, not some quarter-length joke. Eventually, three 20m coaches could be linked together. Then an extra 20m coach at both ends of each 3 car, 60m train. While a five car, 100m train would seem too long for a 50m, inept BC station, a walkthrough train makes it a possibility. That and Selective_door_operation makes a 5 car train quite possible. 

It is very sad that the backward BC mentality never properly envisioned a 10 car train to provide a high capacity link between the Tsawwassen_ferry_terminalBridgeport_station & the YVR-Airport_stationDowntown_VancouverPark_Royal_Exchange and the Horseshoe_Bay_ferry_terminal. Only a properly functioning metropolitan region can do something like that. Greater Vancouver just isn't at that level yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-train

"The operation of the Central Circle is similar to the S-Train systems in Germany and other countries."




"The line is operated by 33 Siemens ES2G Lastochka trains..."
Russians aren't afraid to use good German technology.
I wish that they would allow some of that German tech in BC but BC still strives to maintain and keep things at a smaller scale. 

The Moscow Circle Line is a much more recent development than the one in London. 

"Since the beginning, platforms have been at least 155 metres (509 ft) long to accommodate eight-car trains. The only exceptions are on the Filyovskaya LineVystavochnayaMezhdunarodnayaStudencheskayaKutuzovskayaFiliBagrationovskayaFilyovsky Park and Pionerskaya, which only allows six-car trains..."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro#Rolling_stock 

There is suppose to be secret deeper level subway around Moscow.

Of course when severe flooding occurs, the subways are among the first things to be affected.




How in the hell is the 3rd line constructed to have the smallest stations, in-spite of increasing future demand? 


No city has spent billions of dollars just to have 2 car trains, except Vancouver & Richmond.

Apparently, the 50 m platforms are only long enough to accommodate 2.5 car trains as capacity demand increases. http://www.railforthevalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Canada-Rail-213-e14082980653651.jpg

Sure in the early years, Montreal could run a Mickey Mouse 3 car train, but their Metro stations were designed to accommodate a 9 car train during the very busy times & 6 car trains for intermediate demand. 

So the BC inept planning process never allowed for a future demand of at least 152.5 m or 500 foot long stations & platforms. Instead, they designed the max potential to be only 50m or 164 feet. That's pathetic & only adds to the deliberate bottleneck planning approach that BC aspires to. 


As long as a line above ground & especially underground, has level sections of 500, 600 or 700 feet, then full length stations can be constructed.
When BC planers only allowed for a 50m or 164 foot level section for each Catheter Line, 




If a system starts out with little trains but has designed the ability to triple or quadruple the length of the station platforms, then its just a matter of building that future extension right from the start or at some point later on. 

Chicago & BART can still run ridiculous 4 car trains but the capacity to run 10 car trains was built in right from the start.

SYDNEY and its metro
Not only does Sydney have much longer trains & platforms, they are double level trains! Its like BC has made sure that it must never match the capacity that NSW & New_England has allowed for.

TOP 10 of the most beautiful trains in Japan

V-BC strives to perpetually be one of the most stunted or underbuilt major cities on the planet.