Canada Line | Completed

[Gordon]

The MarkII Cars are designed to have a 3rd car added in the middle of the (with the articulated ends) with the extended platforms it may be possible to insert 1 of those cars in the middle of 1 of the 2 car units too make a 5 car train.

[eduardo88]

Originally Posted by Gordon

The MarkII Cars are designed to have a 3rd car added in the middle of the (with the articulated ends) with the extended platforms it may be possible to insert 1 of those cars in the middle of 1 of the 2 car units too make a 5 car train.

Aren't the platforms being expanded to handle 6 MarkII cars? So trains would be A-C-B-A-C-B. It'd be better if we just bought a whole bunch of C-cars and ran A-C-C-C-C-B and retired our MarkI's.

[twoNeurons]

The C cars haven't been designed yet. It's probably cheaper to buy AB Cars for the time being.

Here's an image of why the transfers at Lionel-groulx are seamless:


Basically, to transfer trains... most people only will need to walk across the platform. This is difficult to do unless the platforms are parallel for a distance. Most of the trains here will be interlined, so I don't think it's that big a deal here. Columbia was a missed opportunity and should've had a center platform, but that wasn't known when the expo line was built.

It will be interesting to see how Lougheed station is done with the PMC line.

Since Bridgeport will be center platform, that's good... so transfers from YVR to Richmond don't involve stairs.

[deasine]

That's exactly like the MTR:

[officedweller]

The main problem with a basket weave station like at Lionel Groulx is that it's best done undergound - having tracks weave around that much above-ground would be an eyesore (especially the support structures). Think Bridgeport Station flyovers times two (or more).

[LeftCoaster]

Originally Posted by tintinium

The C cars haven't been designed yet. It's probably cheaper to buy AB Cars for the time being.

The Mark 1s work fine anyway, I dont have any matinence data but they are not very old relatively when you compare them to trains on other systems. I hope we get much mroe use out of them than just 20 years.

[mr.x]

updates by Tafryn, 8-06:
http://canadalinephotos.blogspot.com/




YALETOWN-ROUNDHOUSE STATION













Deep entrance









WATERFRONT STATION

[crazyjoeda]

Originally Posted by SpongeG

you'd have to be suicidal to want to ride a bike down no3 road anyway - lol

Not if you don't suck. I've done it and I had no problem, and I actually went faster than some cars. Richmond does need to improve bicycle infrastructure though; since the city is so flat its a great place to ride.

[Dave2]

Lionel-groulx isn't a basket weave cross plaform transfer as I understand it from Wikipedia, each line is stacked e/b above w/b allowing a cross platform transfer to the other line... my favourite photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lionel-groulx-montreal-metro.jpg

I don't think we'll see anything so elegant at Broadway and Cambie, but if they put the M line directly underneath the Canada Line, so that you can get from one line to the other easily, I'd think that many M Line passengers bound for Granville/Georgia or Waterfront would transfer there rather than endure the 120-180 seconds it takes to hike up from Commercial to Broadway. That transfer isn't too bad if you're first off the train, but inevitably if you're not amongst the first off you get stuck behind people who seem to walk at the pace of Molasses

[subdude]

Georgia/Granville today:



photo by me.

[northwest2k]

Originally Posted by cc85

no.3 has put to shame lougheed highway, burnaby did such a poor job in places where the speed limit is reduced. i can undertand the need not to adequately design pedestrian elements in areas of faster speeds, but all across the board there is nothing.

burnaby has no downtown, if anything were to compare to that it would be brentwood and lougheed town centres. Both are sprawl city and will have a hard time converting. richmond is really on track with their downtown. The next challenge will be to integrate bridgepoint with landsdown et al.

Richmond passed Burnaby a long time ago in every positive category imaginable.

[randito]

Originally Posted by officedweller

The main problem with a basket weave station like at Lionel Groulx is that it's best done undergound - having tracks weave around that much above-ground would be an eyesore (especially the support structures). Think Bridgeport Station flyovers times two (or more).

Yeah it is interesting geology there too. AFAIK the orange line is bored, and SUPER deep, and the green line is cut and cover, but after that S-curve the green line does, it hits some really unstable crumbly rock. I think they even had a cave in when building station de l'église. the escalators hug the ceiling so tight they had to rubberise the ceiling because people were bumping their heads!!!

The most intersting part of lionel-groulx is that to switch lines and continue in the same direction, IE to continue downtown, you cross the platform, rather than take the escalator to another level like in most subway systems. also, because of the s-curve of the green lines, although you are crossing the platform to continue downtown, the trains approach from opposite directions. super counter-intuitive, yet amazingly efficient. something like 80% of the transfers between lines happen in like 5 steps across a platform. when 2 trains arrive at the same time, it is really nice to watch.


For some reason my images are not showing up, but these are the silly escalators after the cave-in:

http://www.metrodemontreal.com/green/deleglise/texture2.jpg


http://www.metrodemontreal.com/green/deleglise/xsection.gif

[randito]

Originally Posted by LeftCoaster

The Mark 1s work fine anyway, I dont have any matinence data but they are not very old relatively when you compare them to trains on other systems. I hope we get much mroe use out of them than just 20 years.

Ha HA montreal is running cars that were built in 1963!

[SpongeG]

Canada Line gets extra loan

The province and TransLink will lend Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc. extra bridging money because $56.5 million it invested in the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market remains frozen.

TransLink's board on July 31 amended its loan agreement with the Canada Line subsidiary that oversees the construction and launch of the new rapid transit line from Vancouver to Richmond and the airport.

Officials weren't able to say how much additional borrowing room they now have.

ABCP investments were backed by U.S. residential mortgages but suddenly stopped trading last summer when the U.S. real estate market began to melt down and heavy mortgage defaults began.

Individual Canadians, corporations and agencies have $33 billion tied up in ABCP that so far can't be redeemed.

A restructuring plan that would allow trading of ABCP to resume – although at sharply reduced valuations – has been in the works for months but has not yet cleared all legal hurdles.

Canada Line spokesman Alan Devers expects much of the money will be recovered – and the loan repaid – once ABCP trading does restart.

"We still have the asset-backed securities and when that process finally concludes we'll go to market and we'll recover what we're going to recover," he said.

Canada Line Rapid Transit has estimated the fair market value of its ABCP holdings at $49.3 million – suggesting a loss of $7.2 million or 12.7 per cent is likely.

ICBC also holds $45 million in frozen ABCP, while the Fraser Health Authority has $13 million.

Devers said the $2-billion Canada Line remains on budget and on track to open by November of 2009.

"We're still slightly ahead of schedule," he said.

Traffic chaos along the Cambie Street corridor in Vancouver, where the cut-and-cover construction has proceeded for the past three years, is expected to end this fall.

http://www.bclocalnews.com/news/27035829.html

[squeezied]

Originally Posted by northwest2k

Richmond passed Burnaby a long time ago in every positive category imaginable.

you obviously haven't been banned long enough.

[Gordon]

It would be interesting to know why the Canada Line platforms are so much smaller that the Expo and Millennium Line ones are, when you consider that the 80M platforms for the Expo Line will be extended to be able to handle 6 car Mark II trains.

Are they expecting this line to need a far smaller Maximum capacity in the future?

or could this have been a budgetary decision due to the cost of underground stations which are far more expensive then E or M lines stations?

[mr.x]

Originally Posted by Gordon

Are they expecting this line to need a far smaller Maximum capacity in the future?

or could this have been a budgetary decision due to the cost of underground stations which are far more expensive then E or M lines stations?

A little bit of both, but mainly the latter.

[Jared]

Does anyone know any programs that do the following:

1) A program that shrinks jpegs, but it can do a whole bunch automatically, so I dont have to do each one individually.

2) A program that will shrink the pixel resolution (and perhaps the quality a little) of video (.avi) files?

I have a bunch of great pictures that I took today (inside the bored tunnel, photos showing trackwork progress, inside the OMC operations room, OMC train maintainance area, Van City Center station concourse and platforms, Yaletown and Olympic Village station from the inside etc.). However, the pictures are about 2MB each, and I have about a hundred, so that will take forever to upload (and I would need to find an imagehost that could do those sizes).

Also, I have a video from inside a Canada Line Train, as we travel from Bridgeport Station to Sea Island Centre station. Unfortunately, the total size is about 400mb (its split into 3 vids), so I cant upload this to Youtube or whatever very easily. I need to shrink these files first.


Thanks
Jared

[twoNeurons]

Originally Posted by Jared

Does anyone know any programs that do the following:

1) A program that shrinks jpegs, but it can do a whole bunch automatically, so I dont have to do each one individually.

2) A program that will shrink the pixel resolution (and perhaps the quality a little) of video (.avi) files?

I have a bunch of great pictures that I took today (inside the bored tunnel, photos showing trackwork progress, inside the OMC operations room, OMC train maintainance area, Van City Center station concourse and platforms, Yaletown and Olympic Village station from the inside etc.). However, the pictures are about 2MB each, and I have about a hundred, so that will take forever to upload (and I would need to find an imagehost that could do those sizes).

Also, I have a video from inside a Canada Line Train, as we travel from Bridgeport Station to Sea Island Centre station. Unfortunately, the total size is about 400mb (its split into 3 vids), so I cant upload this to Youtube or whatever very easily. I need to shrink these files first.


Thanks
Jared

If you're on a PC, Irfanview works really well for batch resizing.

For the video, this might help:
http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/ipod-video.ars/5

[Jared]

Thanks, I'll check those out tommorow.

Since I dont want to be a total tease, here is a short video from Bridgeport Platform level of a train arriving at the station:

http://rapidshare.com/files/137902987/Tofino06_131.avi.html


Yes, I know its called Tofino06...

Its been a while since I used this computer for photos, and I forgot to update the auto-naming thingy.