ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[Bytor]

These are supposed to be experts...they should know about this before hand.

There was an interesting comment on Reddit in reply to Cory, https://www.reddit.com/r/waterloo/commen...?context=1 . I have no idea if it's true, and 50% increase in capital cost seems like an exaggeration, but I do remember that there's some sections of the route (at least King/Victoria) that are right at the maximum possible grade for the Flexity Freedom. So it seems at least somewhat plausible.

The comment in full is:

My (unofficial) understanding is that the route itself is problematic for adverse weather. Specifically, that the grade in places is steeper than the trains can be expected to climb in icing conditions. Fixing this would have required a route change which would have increased the entire ion cost by 50% or more.

The decision was made that the local economic cost of shutting it down for a day or every year or two was more palatable than increasing the project cost by that amount. Also, since they expected to be shut down in icy weather due to the grade, they didn't initially invest in other features which would allow operation in those conditions if the grade weren't an issue (ie. catenary scrapers).

Assuming this isn't exaggerated (I heard it during a casual conversation), it actually all seems pretty reasonable to me. The economic case for increasing capital expenditures by 50% in order to increase reliability from 98% to 98.25% (or whatever it would have been) is pretty weak.

However, it seems like the grade has actually been less of an issue than they originally thought, meaning that the bottleneck to operation in these conditions has been the other equipment they chose not to buy. This has the appearance of poor planning, when they actually just made a reasonable decision based on operating expectations.

There's a few problems with what SmallBig1993 said.

The decision was made that the local economic cost of shutting it down for a day or every year or two was more palatable than increasing the project cost by that amount.

But that directly contradicts the part where Goetzke says "and Keolis, the system operator, has not met its contractual requirements in the latest weather event".

Also, since they expected to be shut down in icy weather

That, too, is contradicted by what Goetzke says, because if that were the case then provisions in the contract about abut acceptable shutdowns would cover incidents like this and therefore GrandLinq would not been in violation of the contract. But given that they were deemed as not meeting contractual requirements, it says that continuing to run in relatively minor (as in not a state of emergency massive ice storm) freezing rain was expected.

Specifically, that the grade in places is steeper than the trains can be expected to climb in icing conditions. Fixing this would have required a route change which would have increased the entire ion cost by 50% or more.

Slope is a wheels on rails problem, a traction issue, not a catenary problem, which this was. None of these ice problems since 2019 have been a traction issue. They have all been problems with the catenary wires.

Combine that with plenty of places with trams a similar or worse winter conditions to us having trams have routs with gradients of 8-10% with little to no problem, and I believe our steepest gradient is 6% along King St. West the other side of the rail bridge from Central Station, leads me to think that this claim about a 50% more expensive route to be wildly exaggerated, if not completely bogus.