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Originally Posted by swimmer_spe
Or maybe we have all been focused on being right instead of seeing meaningful discussion. I am not digging through here, but when someone points to a fact that I did not know, or that I got wrong, I acknowledge it and then work with the new fact.
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I don’t expect any participant to be an expert on the subject, but it does help if we don’t have to discuss whether yellow is yellow or bright purple. That said, I certainly appreciate your new, more constructive approach to the discussions here and I'm looking forward to sharing two larger posts on which I have been working over the last few weeks, which both relate to the wonderful world of passenger rail timetabling: one will look at how the services on the CN route would have looked if VIA had been allowed to keep the Canadian on the CP route, whereas the other will look at the challenges and trade-offs when scheduling once-daily or night trains...
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I have been trying to use their trip planner and the PDFs. I am still trying to figure out what day 1,2,3, etc is. It is a learning process.
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I admit that VIA’s timetables can be a bit difficult to read, but every PDF timetable file comes with handy explanations like these (found in the
System timetable PDF on page 3):
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This is not my area of expertise, but that does not mean I cannot learn and create a good report from quality research.
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The degree of expertise you already command only determines how much knowledge and understanding you will need to acquire to obtain the level of quality in your research you desire. Your skills and abilities will only influence how much time and efforts that learning process will take…
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That actually was a mistake. I thought there was no space. People spell my first name wrong all the time, even when I spell it out for them.
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No offence taken and if your first name is the same as the first part of your user name on Urban Toronto, I don’t have any problem believing you your struggle, as it is a very common first name with an inversion of two letters which most people would "correct" as a
typo.
One of my British friends from studying in England still calls me "John", even after sharing an apartment together for two separate years and me inviting him to my wedding. Also, most of the people here in Quebec who see my name before they call or talk to me in person assume that I’m a woman (because it is a woman’s name in French, whereas a famous inventor/printer, astronomer/mathematician and composer all can attest that it is a legit men’s name in German –
let’s see who will be able to identify all three namesakes of mine to which I’m referring here [hint: they all lived in different centuries]…).
It’s also amazing how many people I met in England who could perfectly pronounce the name of the largest city in South Africa, yet completely butcher it whenever they are asked to just omit the last syllable (i.e. the only part which is not part of my first name)…
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Whether you want to help or not, it's up to you. You seem to have a lot of information.
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I unfortunately don’t have much time to spare at the moment, as this is turning into a very challenging year at work (and that not just because of the blockades or outside factors affecting the demand for travel and tourism worldwide), but I’ll happily provide my feedback/suggestions/corrections, if invited to do so…
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If you were to join us, I would ask one thing - leave your bias at the door. We want the facts to speak on their own, but in an organized fashion. So, arguments on what will or will not work must be clearly shown in the facts.
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I’m realistic enough to acknowledge that I have my own biases, but I have the suspicion that what you perceive as such are rather my attempts to put myself into the shoes of people who are much more skeptical of passenger rail services than myself and to try to figure out to what kind of arguments they would be more receptive and to which ones less. Any allusions to the primaries of the Democratic party of our Southern neighbors are of course purely unintended, but your ability to gather enough support to succeed is determined by how convincing you are to those which are skeptical to your plans and not to those which are already stoked…
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My concern is whether your employer has some sort of rule, like a nondisclosure, or conflict of interest. In the military, I had rules that governed what I could and could not do outside of the military. Even now, I still have some restrictions.
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Originally Posted by p_xavier
I like Urban Sky discussions, but I wonder how the heck he's allowed to talk about work items like that. I for sure can't disclose of any information from work before I get explicit apporoval from the higher management?
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Originally Posted by swimmer_spe
I like them too. He has lots of information. If I gave that kind of information out as a military member, I would be court marshaled and spend a really long time in a really tiny space.
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As is the case with every employee, my freedom of speech ends where I disclose information to which I only have access as an employee. Consequently, I have to make sure that I only post information and manipulate data which is publicly accessible and the best way of ensuring this is to meticulously state my sources. Therefore, I have to ask you: which information/data/documents I shared here or any other forum (in which I am known under the same name as here) would not have been accessible to a member of the general public (like yourself)?
It's of course in the nature of the our respective (in your case: previous) employers that there is much more operative information available about a Crown Corporation providing a very visible service (like passenger rail transportation) than about the Military, but virtually all the information I post here comes from timetables or reports (Annual Reports, Corporate Plans or Sustainable Mobility Reports) which have been published by VIA Rail directly, but if you think there is something I posted which you don’t think a non-employee could have posted, then please post/quote it here and I will dissect to you where I got all the information I used from and how I used it!
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Originally Posted by J81
No i said it had nothing to do with TC being lazy. Dont put words in my mouth. Theres a reason why TC works closely with the FRA. Both countries systems are fully integrated so why would TC want that to change? Just so we can run European DMUs?
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Everyone remotely familiar with the incredible bureaucratic and technical hurdles which still plague cross-border rail transport in Europe (despite decade-long laudable efforts of the European Union to create a unified European rail network), due to the large variety of different and incompatible laws, regulations, rules, voltage, track gauges, loading gauges, platform/boarding heights and train control systems a train traveling across the continent might have to deal with, will acknowledge that regulatory alignment with the FRA has allowed to make cross-border trade by rail much more efficient than in Europe at the mutual benefit of both countries involved.
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Originally Posted by swimmer_spe
Do you notice it is hFr, not hSr? Those letters do mean something.
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As much as HSR freaks like "High Speed Rail Canada" will deny this, the main motivation to build HSR has always been to create the capacity to run additional trains. Only once the need to construct a dedicated infrastructure for the most disruptive train type (i.e. intercity trains) crystallizes as the only feasible way to increase overall train capacity, the focus shifts to the possibility to cut travel times much further by choosing a very straight alignment.
Conversely, HFR attempts to achieve the desired increase in capacity by building dedicated tracks into existing right-of-ways (with minimal modifications to the alignment), in order to reach a travel time which is competitive against driving and taking the bus, yet keeps capital costs at a manageable level. This approach is best described by the previous VIA CEO quoted in this
newspaper article:
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But the head of Canada’s dominant passenger rail service, Via Rail Canada, says high-speed rail is a tremendously expensive proposition, and it makes little sense to invest in it until the serious existing congestion problems on Canadian railways is solved.
“Back in 2012, there was a report published that pegged the cost of high-speed rail between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal at $10 billion, and for $10 billion it would get you 10-million customers,” said Via CEO Yves Desjardins-Siciliano. Simply providing dedicated passenger lines at conventional speed, he said, “will cost $3 billion for seven million (passengers), so it’s a third of the cost for two-thirds of the benefit.”
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That said, HFR would still provide significant travel time savings, as outlined on
VIA’s HFR project page:
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By running on dedicated tracks, VIA Rail would offer more frequencies while reducing trip times by 25% and improving on-time performance over 95%.
The dedicated tracks would allow VIA Rail to have control over frequencies, speeds, and traffic priorities. For example, trains could travel at speeds of up to 177 kilometres per hour (or 110 miles per hour), reducing travel times from Ottawa to Toronto to as low as 3 hours and 15 minutes from current travel times of approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes.
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Originally Posted by swimmer_spe
What if the money is there to make it only go 60-70mph, should it not be done? I would argue that we need to start from somewhere to build back up our passenger service throughout Canada.
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And that’s where we are back again at the ever-circling argument in which you insist that money should be spend on intercity passenger rail services anywhere in this country regardless of how uncompetitive they would be, whereas myself and other posters here point out that it is preferable to focus it on where it will have the most impact and chance to make this mode of transport more relevant in the public eye, thus growing the demand and eventually also the political will for expanding such services onto the routes where you want to see them…
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