An alternative to tunneling under Barrington is the one I had come up with; remove parking from both Brunswick and Hollis, and form a U shape along Brunswick-Cogswell-Hollis and back onto the south-end rail cut.
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Originally Posted by MonctonGoldenFlames
Looking at Google Earth, I thought a 'U' shaped street car line could be run down Quinpool to Cogswell to Rainnie to Duke until Barrington. From Barrington it would turn back up Spring Garden Rd to Robie or even Dalhousie. What do you think?
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Sounds like the old tramcar Belt Line, later renumbered routes 1 & 2 back in the trolleycoach days. Now that would be a blast from the past!
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Originally Posted by terrynorthend
Nowadays buses are efficient and are becoming "cleaner" running all the time. Instead of putting rails and wires back onto narrow, over-crowded streets, Metro Transit would be better off to invest in a few hydrogen-powered buses for routes like this.
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As far as I know, this is the plan. Kinda.
They're planning to buy a couple of diesel-electric buses for a downtown shuttle type service.
Quote:
Originally Posted by terrynorthend
Years ago Halifax had overhead-electric rail trolleys, then these were replaced by rubber-tired trolleys that used the same wires. Eventually they removed the wires altogether and went to internal combustion buses.
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Now I'm just going to be picky:
The new trolley coaches actually didn't use the same wires, as the trolleys used dual power poles, where as the tram cars used single power poles (the metal tracks were used as ground). In the weeks heading up to the changeover date, they installed all of the overhead wires for the trolleys above the existing tram car overhead. On the night before the first day of trolley coach operations, they went around and frantically took down all of the tram car wires, so the trolleys could head out first thing in the morning.
As it is, the conversion took a few weeks; only the routes servicing the downtown/Spring Garden/Quinpool/Almon street areas were converted to trolley coach, and routes like the Armdale, Point Pleasant Park and Gottingen/Richmond routes remained serviced by trams. In fact, since there was no overhead wires for the trams on these routes to use downtown, they were essentially "orphaned" on the outer parts of their respective routes, and passengers had to transfer from trams to trolleys at designated points
