Today Fri Sat
It is forcast to be Fog at 11:00 PM EDT on May 24, 2012
Fog
29°/18°		 It is forcast to be Chance of a Thunderstorm at 11:00 PM EDT on May 25, 2012
Chance of a Thunderstorm
31°/19°		 It is forcast to be Mostly Cloudy at 11:00 PM EDT on May 26, 2012
Mostly Cloudy
26°/16°

12 Comments

news

Metrolinx Staff Recommends Electrification

By Steve Kupferman

20110119metrolinx.jpg
Photo by ||adam||, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.


Staff at Metronlinx, Toronto’s regional transportation agency, are recommending that the Lakeshore and Georgetown GO lines, the system’s busiest, be outfitted for electric trains—a move they say would bring down rail commute times and save operating dollars in the long term. If the Metrolinx board of directors signs off on the recommendation during its January 26 meeting, and the province agrees to fund it, the first electric trains could be running on GO tracks in seven to nine years.


The planned Air Rail Link between Union Station and Pearson Airport would also be electrified, if the staff recommendations were adopted as proposed. But Metrolinx President and CEO Bruce McCuaig asserted that his organization will build the Link by 2015, the year of Toronto’s Pan-Am Games, before any of the electrification work would be completed.
“We’re absolutely committed to delivering the Air Rail Link service for 2015, and that is one of our fundamental commitments to the province, and we’re going to deliver on that project,” he said. Metronlinx is in the process of buying diesel rolling stock to run on the Link, but McCuaig says all of it will be convertible to electric.
And so the Link would initially run diesel trains, until the equipment necessary for electrification was fully installed. Metrolinx staff say the Link would be fully electric no sooner than seven years from now.
The Link and the easternmost end of the Georgetown GO line would be among the first sections of track to be electrified under the proposed plan, with other parts of the Georgetown and Lakeshore GO corridors to follow, in segments. The whole electrification plan, as proposed, would cost an estimated $1.6 to $1.8 billion, on top of the costs of track maintenance and expansion work already planned or underway.
Staff studied several different electrification scenarios, including electrification of the entire GO system, but decided, because of cost and other factors, that concentrating on the Georgetown and Lakeshore lines was the most beneficial option.
If ridership continues to grow as planned, estimated annual operating savings from electrification could be up to eighteen million dollars per year, in part because of the rising cost of diesel fuel. Electric locomotives would improve commute times by as much as seven minutes on certain sections of track, but the study found that the locomotives have only marginal environmental benefits, as opposed to modern diesels.
The completion of the electrification study is in some sense the culmination of a long dispute between Metrolinx and west-end residents over the future of the Georgetown GO corridor, which runs through several densely populated neighbourhoods in west Toronto and beyond. Metrolinx’s initial plan was to greatly expand diesel service on the Georgetown GO corridor without a timetable for electrification. They would say only that electric trains were part of their “fifteen-year plan.” Residents were concerned about the possible health effects of increased diesel exhaust fumes.
Even if these new staff proposals were implemented unchanged (and nobody’s sure what the chances of that happening might be) it would be a minimum of seven years before the section of the Georgetown corridor nearest downtown was fully electrified, and a minimum of nine years before any further work on the Georgetown line was completed, according to the report.
And so this isn’t a dramatic reversal of Metrolinx’s position with respect to electrification so much as a refinement of their original promise. Now there is a timeline, of sorts, and all that remains to be seen is whether or not it’s a realistic one—and one the Metrolinx board, the province, and community activists can get behind.
Get the whole electrification study, for your personal reading pleasure, right here.

Filed under: , , , , , ,

Report error Send a tip

Comments

  • Eric S. Smith

    Electric locomotives aren't what you want. What you want are EMUs. I don't see how GO could afford to replace all of its rolling stock with self-propelled electric cars immediately, though, so electric locomotives are the obvious transitional measure.

  • tomwest

    If you read the study, it says that EMUs cost 40% more than a loco+carriages to buy. It also says that EMUs have a lifecycle cost 2.5 times that of oco+carriages.

  • TokyoTuds

    CP expanded across Canada from ONtario to BC in 4 years (1881-85). Why the heck does it take 7-9 years to electrify an existing local commuter line?

  • http://piorkowski.ca Jarek Piórkowski

    You could do it in half a year if you had the money upfront. Which we don't.

    Additional reasons: complexity of working in an existing corridor rather than emptiness; greater required reliability of the construction; labour laws. But money's the big one.

  • nevilleross

    Now they say we should have electric rail. What made them change their minds?

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    What made them change their minds?

    Er, the completion of a methodical study of the relative merits of several plausible alternatives?

    The other route is to make premature announcements that later unravel as it becomes clear they involve fantastically optimistic timelines or are prohibitively expensive. That's politics (see: Ford on a Scarborough subway), not planning.

  • TokyoTuds

    I don't expect it done in 6 months, but a minimum of 7 years? The money question is simply political will of how to fund a capital project.

    My local commuter line when I first lived in Tokyo took about 4km of heavily used track and built an elevated line to eliminate level crossings. It did so in a few years and without cancelling a single run with as short as 4 minute headways 19 hours a day.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…

  • http://piorkowski.ca Jarek Piórkowski

    “The money question is simply political will of how to fund a capital project.”

    Absolutely. We don't have serious political will to fund public transit capital projects, either.

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    Tuds, that's the point of the quote from Steve Munro that was posted the same day as this article.

    The money question is, I suppose, easily categorized as a matter of political will. I hope that's what you meant by “simply.” How that political will is to be marshalled—or better yet, how we might establish systems that fund transit consistently even as political will waxes and wanes—is far, far from simple.

    There was also this; see the part where they're invited into the living room of the “structural engineer,” who impossibly characterizes “a money problem” as distinct from finding “the right solution.”

    Really, solving those issues is more important than what gets built where.

  • TokyoTuds

    Paul, you are completely right! I would hope that sustained capital investment in public transit would be of the same (or similar) model as sustained capital investment in public education.

  • Eric S. Smith

    The study also shows a doubling to tripling of the time savings if you go with EMUs (page 27, 43rd page of the PDF), and says that the case for them will improve as more and more capacity is required (§14.3, pp 82–83).

    The study does make that 40%/2.3× claim, but it doesn't explain how the figures were derived. As I understand it, the maintenance and inspection requirements for motorized rail cars are more extensive than they are for unpowered ones, so that would certainly be one place where the costs would rise. There's also the question of the commercial availability of bi-level EMUs, but we don't know whether they've just guessed that they'd be 40% more expensive or if they're working from specific examples.

    The study assigns a value to saved time over thirty years of almost 700 million dollars for the electric locomotive option (§12.2); the doubling of that benefit might make the increased expense go down a little more easily. Furthermore, the time savings assigned to the EMU option also assume that only half of the cars in a train will be powered, without bothering to explain why that option was picked. You'd see even better performance with all cars, and indeed all axles, powered, and that could be not just nice to have but logistically essential as they have to cram more and more trains through Union Station at peak hours.

    That said, it's always going to be cheaper to rebuild or replace a few unpowered passenger cars or electric locomotives at a time than it's going to be to buy all-new EMUs of equivalent capacity. Look at the age of some of the cars that VIA Rail hauls across the country, for instance: you can drag the lifetimes of these things out for decades and decades. I think that it's pretty obvious what option we'd go with, at any one time, given the history of underfunding.

  • Eric S. Smith

    The study also shows a doubling to tripling of the time savings if you go with EMUs (page 27, 43rd page of the PDF), and says that the case for them will improve as more and more capacity is required (§14.3, pp 82–83).

    The study does make that 40%/2.3× claim, but it doesn't explain how the figures were derived. As I understand it, the maintenance and inspection requirements for motorized rail cars are more extensive than they are for unpowered ones, so that would certainly be one place where the costs would rise. There's also the question of the commercial availability of bi-level EMUs, but we don't know whether they've just guessed that they'd be 40% more expensive or if they're working from specific examples.

    The study assigns a value to saved time over thirty years of almost 700 million dollars for the electric locomotive option (§12.2); the doubling of that benefit might make the increased expense go down a little more easily. Furthermore, the time savings assigned to the EMU option also assume that only half of the cars in a train will be powered, without bothering to explain why that option was picked. You'd see even better performance with all cars, and indeed all axles, powered, and that could be not just nice to have but logistically essential as they have to cram more and more trains through Union Station at peak hours.

    That said, it's always going to be cheaper to rebuild or replace a few unpowered passenger cars or electric locomotives at a time than it's going to be to buy all-new EMUs of equivalent capacity. Look at the age of some of the cars that VIA Rail hauls across the country, for instance: you can drag the lifetimes of these things out for decades and decades. I think that it's pretty obvious what option we'd go with, at any one time, given the history of underfunding.