07-03-2023, 09:19 AM
(07-03-2023, 08:46 AM)nms Wrote:(06-30-2023, 04:49 PM)ac3r Wrote: Hardly surprising. GO trains are suburban trains, similar to a German S-Bahn or Montréal's REM. London is way too far away for a GO train there to make any sense. 4 hours each way is way too long.
Would be nice if VIA could run more frequently but that's asking a lot. Plus, getting the freight operators to cooperate is always a challenge.
The quoted article suggested that VIA Trains 82 and 83 would return, but the route would be London-Brantford-Toronto. I would not be surprised if GO Transit stretches a little further west to ultimately terminate at Stratford 10-20 years from now.
So how many Via trains from London <-> Kitchener will we see then? 2 or 3? Didn't these trains originally service Sarnia?
I do want to address the comparison between GO and REM/S-Bahn...they aren't really similar, given GO's abysmal frequency, commuter focused service, and massive rolling stock. I do think GO aspires to be a service like that, and that certainly is one option.
But I'd argue a better option would be to aspire to be more like NS. The Netherlands doesn't really have any services like a S-Bahn or REM, they have local transit (a line or two of which could be considered "regional" in that the traverse the Rotterdam/Hague complex--no kidding from the right hill on the coast you can see both cities on the skyline, they're really close together) and then they have NS (and a few other smaller train companies) which operate frequent services very similar to GO. Some EMUs, some double-deckers, some locomotive pulled trains, which traverse the whole of the Netherlands. Unlike GO they are focused on several central cities and some smaller regional cities. The area covered is smaller than southern Ontario, but only by about half, certainly if you scale it up, there are a similar number of cities and regions.
To me, this is a much more useful kind of service than an S-Bahn/REM service because it services many more trip pairs and much more area.
In such a system, GO would obviously operate to London, but London would be a hub in it's own right, and people would take the train from Kitchener to London--something which Metrolinx doesn't seem to think is thing that could happen.
I will say, while it does seem rather magical here, and close to the Randstad (where we are) trains are great, I have heard that things aren't so peachy in the more remote areas, which is something which has caused NS to lose a lot of their franchises and hence Arriva and other train operators are operating in the north of the country. And I do think that being a little more spread out means that Toronto does need a lot of focus, something that our toxic political environment probably wouldn't work with a single train operator. But at the same time, it is just so frustrating that I can take the train to the beach here, but in Canada, I have to sit for hours in traffic trying to get to Wasaga...