A Cost Comparison of Transportation Modes

A Cost Comparison of Transportation Modes The 2009 study by UBC Professor Patrick Condon, the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design program can be read by clicking on the title. Though the […]

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM RAIL FOR THE VALLEY

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM RAIL FOR THE VALLEY  

If you tell a SkyTrain lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

This is an updated post from 2009.   The title quote by Joseph Goebbels, famed Nazi propagandist, aptly describes the SkyTrain lobby’s and BC Transit/TransLink’s thirty year long propaganda campaign to sell SkyTrain and discredit modern light rail. The many pro-SkyTrain blog sites that offer little in fact, but much unfounded rhetoric. All the bumf […]

The Big SkyTrain Sell – Eby And The NDP Are Worried

 The Vancouver Sun has always shilled for SkyTrain. They repeat government hype as factual news. What this huge infomercial in the Vancouver sun tells me that Eby and the NDP are extremely worried that their agreement for the flip flop from originally planned LRT to extending the Expo Line 16 km to Langley will not […]

Hyperloop Has Joined The Atmospheric Railway Graveyard Of Broken Dreams

The HyperLoop Lobby, like the Bicycle and SkyTrain lobby’s, was very persistent with their claims, but very short on actual history and lived in a sort of “Tom Swift” fairy tale bubble. Tom Swift is the main character of six series of American juvenile science fiction and adventure novels that emphasize science, invention, and technology. […]

A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL – RAIL FOR THE VALLEY

Christmas greetings from Rail for the Valley!      

TransLink’s Christmas Humbug To All!

In my Email yesterday there was a season’s greetings from TransLink, or was it? It seems the six figured salary types who work in ‘communications’ are a lazy bunch and didn’t think it is important to actually mean “Season’s Greetings”. Keep the peons happy. The photo attached to the email was an American Thanksgiving wreath, […]

“Even Your Auditor General Seems To Have Done His Sums On The Back Of An Envelope.”

From 2013, updated. I am reposing this from 2013 because I just heard on the radio, the often repeated nonsense, that SkyTrain has a greater capacity than light rail.   The SkyTrain light metro system doesn’t and it never did. From Thales News Release concerning the $1.47 billion signalling upgrade of the Expo and Millennium […]

Norway

Having become somewhat addicted to Driver’s View videos on YouTube I was more than a little surprised at the major engineering required. Norway, population – 5.3 million The Norwegian railway system comprises 4,109 km of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) (standard gauge) track of which 2,644 km is electrified and 274 km double track. […]

Escalating to an Accident

Here is a story which, reported in the Breaker News which was ignored by the mainstream media, which panders to TransLink, which has now been revealed by Bob Mackin. But what I want to point out is something different. I lived in London England in 1980 and took the ‘tube’ regularly (even supped a few […]