The Ever Line SkyTrain Revisited – The Legacy

A repost. First posted by zweisystem on Friday, March 27, 2020 With all the hype and hoopla about the new SkyTrain 5-car train-sets being delivered and the media oo-ing and aw-ing about the system, I thought retelling a little history was in order. One just has to shake ones head! Except for brief mentions of […]

Five Reasons Why The NDP Don’t Want The “Return of the Interurban”.

This post was released on Wednesday, February 11, 2009, sixteen years ago under the title, “Five reasons Why Gordon Campbell and his ‘Falcon’ don’t want the “Return of the Interurban”. It is still relevant today, only the names have been changed, to expose the guilty. Under the NDP, nothing has changed and in fact has […]

Has TransLink Given Up?

Forget the hype and hoopla from politcans about transit; forget the well timed media releases; forget the staged photo-ops for the local papers, if any local papers have survived. The big question facing the region is; has TransLink given up? The big news is that fares are going up, yet the service provided seems unattractive […]

Memo to the M.O.T. – Time to Reread The Leewood Study – Updated

First posted by on Saturday, May 2, 2020 Now fifteen years old, the Leewood Study, done by Leewood Projects (UK), to assess the viability of reinstating a passenger rail service from downtown Vancouver to Chilliwack via the former BC Electric R.R. route, is worth a revisit. Leewood Study The Leewood Study brought a fresh set […]

Farnsworth Is Selling Porkies – So What Else Is New!

The NDP’s master of the screw-up with the Surrey police fiasco and now the minister responsible for SkyTrain, Mike Farnsworth took to the corporate media selling porkies about the Broadway subway. Farsworth is sticking to the creative accounting by TransLink and the NDP government, that the cost for the 5.7 km subway project will still […]

Mobility Pricing – The Rapture of Megaprojects

This was first posted in 2020 and five years later mobility pricing is back on the agenda. Why? Simple, TransLink is broke. The now $16 billion price tag, for the full program to extend the Expo and Millennium Lines a mere 21.7 km has hit a financial iceberg and is $3 to $4 billion short […]

Entering The Land of Unicorns and Pixie Dust – TransLink’s Current P.R. Gamble

A re-post. First posted on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 Memo from Zweisystem: This post is from 2021, yet we still see TransLink beating the drum for more and more money, as politicians, both regional, provincial and federal are afraid to say no more money and live within your means. All financial numbers will be updated […]

50 Years Out of Date

Memo to the Caisse du Depot: REM is a light metro and light metro is obsolete. Automatic (driverless) railways have issues in the snow. It snows in Montreal, doesn’t it? What Vancouver calls SkyTrain is a light-metro and it was deemed obsolete back in the late 70’s and why it was unsalable. Six marketing names […]

Court Case? What Court Case?

The following comment from Mr.Cow has raised eyebrows. “By the way it’s not 205 Mk 5 Cars, its 41, 5 section vehicles, at approximately 17.63 Million per 5 section vehicle. With entirely new sub systems not the longer versions of the Mk 3 trains with similar equipment that the BCRTC thought it was getting. You […]

A Pre Election Band Aid

When the provincial government spends in excess of $16 billion to extend the somewhat obsolete Movia Automatic Light Metro (a.k.a. SkyTrain) system a mere 21.7 km, the regional transit system as a whole suffers. The federal government is partly at fault for this growing financial debacle by compelling the provincial government to continue building with […]