
TramTrain – Success Ignored
A Karlsruhe tram at night The birth of what we call TramTrain or a streetcar that can operate on the mainline railways, came about after much research and public consultation, to provide the the city and region of a ‘user-friendly’ public transit system. In the 1980’s cities with trams or streetcars were seeing a steady […]

Surrey’s One Percent
A bit of news from Surrey, the Surrey Board of Trade did a survey and like all board of Trade survey’s, it point ts to widening roads, but the following caught my eye. The survey also found that more people were driving their own vehicle to get to work in 2023 compared to the year […]

You do Not like Streetcars ……………. Pity!
In Metro Vancouver, publishing the following is considered heresy by the SkyTrain lobby, yet today, SkyTrain shows very little benefits to the community, rather it creates barriers to transit. All the SkyTrain Lobby, the mayor’s Council on Transit, TransLink and the provincial government can show is that SkyTrain drives up property values, creating demovictions for […]

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 […]

Number One Highway Constructions Costs Climbing
This bodes ill for the Expo Line extension to Langley. Transportation Minister Rob Fleming attributes the delays to soil and geotechnical issues. These are the same geotechnical issues that the Langley extension also must face. The following quote is also of interest: This is in addition to the previously approved budget of $2.34 billion for […]

Single Track Operation? More common Than You Think!
OK folks, the following is a small list of the many European regional railways, operating on single tracks or which route operates on portions of single track. Why am I posting this, you say? Last week I received an angry phone call from a gentleman who claimed had done some work for Metro Vancouver […]

Why Not TramTrain?
Why not TramTrain? The genesis of this blog was to advocate and support reintroducing a passenger rail service from Vancouver to Chilliwack and after 13 years since the release of the Leewood Study, which created a template for such a service, the need today is greater than it has ever been. As the upper Fraser […]

Why Light Rail?
Why Light rail? This question has been asked over and over again by those who only know our MALM (SkyTrain) light-metro system. After 40 years of non stop rah-rah, propaganda by the federal and provincial governments, civic governments and bureaucracies; and the various groups made up of, what I call, the “SkyTrain Lobby”, Light-Rail, locally […]

Single Track Operation & Level Crossings – Dutch Style
Some of the detractors of Rail for the Valley’s TramTrain or light DMU line from Marpole to Chilliwack cite that only one train can operate on the line at one time. With properly placed passing loops, preferably at stations, trains can be safely operated going in both directions on a single line. this due […]

Back To Basics
What is light rail? LRT is a transportation system based on electrically powered light rail vehicles (LRV) that operates on a track in a dedicated right-of-way (meaning separated lanes). It is the operating on dedicated or “reserved rights-of-ways that makes a simple streetcar or tram light rail! many simple streetcar or tram systems have sections […]
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