Some New Year’s Reading – Eric Chris’s Six Facts About Hub to Hub Transport

Eric Chris is an Australian professional engineer with a masterai??i??s degree in chemical engineering and has been living in Vancouver near UBC on the 99 B-Line route for the last 16 years.Ai?? He works in the hydrocarbon industry as a design engineer for his entire career.Ai?? His masterai??i??s thesis was on real time air dispersion […]

An Innsbruck Christmas

Merry Christmas

A very merry Christmas from Rail for the Valley! A South Shore Interurban in the snow in Michigan City. Thirty-two years later, the South Shore Interurban still trundles the route daily.

After Intense Pressure From the Provincial Government……………..

The following is part of an article, The direction of TTC planning in the 1980’s, by Philip Webb, which appeared in the December 1983 edition of Modern Tramway and Light Rail Transit. By 1983, the UDTC knew that the ICTS/ALRT system could not offer the capacity as advertised. The ICTS/ALRT proprietary transit system did not […]

Canada Line Train Catches Fire

The fire was on the Canada Line, which isn’t SkyTrain. For those who are not in the know, the SkyTrain system cars are powered by Linear Induction Motors or LIM’s and the Canada Line cars are powered by “squirrel cage” electric motors. Much of Canada Line down By DAN FUMANO, The Province December 20, 2014 […]

A trip down memory lane

The shape of things that never were; a model of an articulated UTDC ALRT vehicle. An advert for ALRT, circa 1983. Sadly for Diane Edgecomb, the Detroit ICTS has been nothing more than a curiosity, which quickly earned the name the “Mugger Mover”. Notice that the gap between the two MK.1’s have been ‘photo shopped’ […]

Oh, what fools we mortals be

In charge of our of our Metro band, Moonbeam is here at hand, With a higher PST, mistook by me, While pleading for a congestion fee. Shall we their fond referendum see? Lord, what fools these mortals be! Apologies to the bard! The regional mayors who support a $0.5% increase to fund TransLink have shown […]

Incresing Transit Capacity By Reducing Transit Stops – A New Stragety For Broadway

The following table from Bus or Light Rail – Making The Right Choice, shows that in Germany, the distance between bus stops is far greater than that of the City of Vancouver. On Broadway, from Granville Street to Alma, on average there is a bus stop every 260 metres, making bus stops very much closer […]

What is Translink Afraid Of?

I can see with the TransLink referendum, that the SkyTrain lobby is claiming all sorts of misleading information about SkyTrain; a SkyTrain subway and SkyTrain fiances. The following is from the GVRD’s 1993 The cost of Transporting People in the British Columbia Lower Mainland. Please note that the annual subsidy for one SkyTrain line was […]

Capacity and speed of transit vehicles in the city

In the past few weeks, the merchants of misinformation have been busy spreading their anti tram rhetoric in a vain attempt to justify a Broadway subway. Unfortunately the mainstream media have repeated the same misinformation without any independent research done. The following charts come from Bus or Light Rail Making the Right Choice, Second Edition, […]