Lessons

A lot has happened with Ottawa’s hybrid light metro/rail system, most of it negative, but most confuse it with the very successful O-Train, which is not light rail at all, rather a regional railway, operating DMU’s. This is what Rail for the Valley is proposing for the Valley Rail scheme and what the E&N folks […]

https://youtu.be/hXbMCqQhOrQ

Ottawa’s O-Train

Part 1 Ottawa’s Trillium Line is often miscaptioned by the media as LRT, it is not. The Trillium Line is a DMU service. The Trillium Line is a good example of providing quality transit at a much lower cost than more expensive tramways and unrealistic and hugely costly light-metro. Monthly operating costs of the 24 […]

A DMU Service, Not Gondolas, Best Option to Link North Shore!

Gondolas are a niche transit system used for solving unique transit problems. While transit servicing SFU mayAi?? present niche transit problems, especially in winter, crossing Burrard inlet does not. The SFU gondola has been reported in this blog several times; in May 2011; in June 2011; and in October 2011.It is now six years later, […]

Forward Thinking – Absent In BC

Now here is a politician who looks three minutes into the future, wanting existing rail lines preserved for future use. We lost the rails in the Kelowna/Vernon corridor; we are about to lose the E&N; and the city of Vancouver is making damn sure that the Arbutus Corridor is not used for rail! The political […]

Diesel light-rail to Chilliwack – What will it cost?

One Canadian transit line, seldom mentioned by TransLink or the Minister for Transportation is Ottawa’s 8 km. diesel LRT line, called the O-Train. The five-station route connects to Ottawa’s existing east-west bus Transitway system with simple stations at its north and south ends. Because it uses an existing rail line, it cost only about $4 […]