05-10-2017, 01:36 PM
(05-10-2017, 08:42 AM)danbrotherston Wrote:(05-10-2017, 01:15 AM)nms Wrote: A couple thoughts:
1. It looked like there will be a pedestrian crossing at the south end of the platform, but pedestrians will be crossing the gauntlets tracks with quite a significant gap between the rails. Will there be some sort of rubber to prevent canes or ankles from getting stuck?
2. I took a look at the functional design drawings (PDF, circa 2014?) for the areas and they appear to show a pedestrian crossing where the internal park road crossing used to be. Today, there was clearly a very complete chain link fence there and it looks (possibly), like the path is going further south than the drawings show (I didn't pause to look past the bulldozer). Did the plan change? Or am I misreading the drawings?
You're definitely not the first to have an issue here. Frustrating, but East-West is a small enough traffic volume for me to accept the situation right now.
As for 1, I imagine some filling will be used, but I doubt it will be much better than the asphalt that has been laid on the road. It appears grandlinq is unable/unwilling to fashion concrete plates for the gauntlet tracks, and the asphalt solution is not great.
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This is why the crossing should have been built slightly further down the track, just far enough from the platform that the gauntlet track was not an issue. Similarly, at UW, the path should just connect the end of the platform to the E5 crossing, instead of having a half-crossing just for the south end of the platform. There was no need to have crossings interacting with the gauntlet tracks at the south end of either platform.
I’m guessing that the concrete plates we use come in standard sizes, and the smaller pieces that would be needed in the gauntlet tracks aren’t among those sizes. I guess the need to put crossings in a gauntlet track section doesn’t come up very often. Although I did see one “brochure” website for a company that makes those plates that advertised custom plates, so a double track would have a single plate running all the way from one track to the next — so instead of rail, plate, concrete, plate, rail it would just be rail, plate rail. Very slick looking, but relied on measuring the exact as-built distance between the tracks so as to custom-fit the plate.