(01-08-2023, 01:57 AM)jwilliamson Wrote:(01-07-2023, 04:58 PM)ac3r Wrote: So the trains are garbage as well as the engineering. No surprise given that they were from Bombardier and overall the project leaders tried to save every cent they could, resulting in a "rapid transit" system that shuts down in the winter, can't climb minor inclines and moves extremely slowly.
You get what you pay for.
That quote sounds like the trains are outperforming expectations. Other than the initial construction and teething issues, and how hard they are to see, what are your complaints with the vehicles?
That we bought trains that immediately started having welds crack. The constant wheel slippage or whatever it is when the train is just riding along like normal even on a normal day on fairly level ground, starts to shake/make noise then the driver has to slam on the brakes and speed up again. Then come first winter, we realized they couldn't make it up very minor grades.
It's clearly both an economic problem and a train/equipment problem. The region/cities were too cheap to invest in a good system (let's be honest here, this thing sucks for the most part and was approved because it was going to make developers a shit load of money with transit-oriented development plans; as a rapid transit system it blows and anyone who disagrees has no idea what they're talking about), too cheap to invest in good equipment and we went with Bombardier who have always been problematic. Let's not forget that they took 2 years longer than expected to deliver our trains, then when we finally got them they began to literally crack apart and had to be sent back.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and hundreds of millions of dollars more (and, ultimately, billions more in the coming decades) so simple failures and cheaping out on basic things is unacceptable. It's no wonder so many in Cambridge don't want to spend the money on it. If getting up the grade at Courtland (near Hayward) is a challenge even without ice - on a perfectly warm summer day the train is moving, braking, moving, braking because the wheels are slipping or something - then how is it expected to navigate the Grand River Valley where the grade will be equal to dozens of meters in height?
It usually works fine, but when it doesn't, it's due to the most ridiculous reasons that should not have been allowed to be signed off on in the first place. But it all went back to spending as little as we could so we could have a bit of a renaissance in the region and make a handful of developers extremely rich, while doing nothing to improve housing or non-LRT related transit for everyone else. It was a tool for an easy mode economic boom, not a real investment in rapid transit. As such, it's pretty crap.