10-13-2017, 05:09 PM
(10-12-2017, 08:38 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(10-12-2017, 08:20 PM)Canard Wrote: What may seem impossibly simple to us is likely impossibly impossible simply due to Transport Canada regulations and the fact that it's considered a "Railway" here, and those regulations trump any kind of logic we might come up with.
Re: the UW stop issue, that is a good point, but it is still not credible that they could not have either (a) had a full crossing immediately south of the station (all the way across both tracks) connecting to an east-side pathway or (b) spread the tracks apart far enough to allow the path to go down between them to the E5 crossing. Given the amount of earthmoving they did to build what was actually built the terrain now existing (which I think makes the idea of adding an east side path north of the E5 crossing difficult) is irrelevant.
I got curious and happened to be near the UW stop so I took a closer look. It turns out the north end of the stop is already exactly the way the south end should be — there is a concrete path extending south from the vehicle crossing to the platform. There is no separate crossing protection for the platform connection itself, just the lights and gates on either side of the two-track corridor. Also the tracks do not fully converge until well after they reach the E5 crossing so there should be enough space between them to do the exact same thing at the south end as at the north end. The only difference is that the path between the tracks would be about 3 times as long as the one at the north end.
Fun fact: the half-crossing at the south end of the platform has lights only, no gates.
So it looks like it could be fixed. The Fastrax machine and the switch machine would both need to be moved to the west side of the tracks from the middle. There is an OCS pole and a signal, but there are poles in the middle of the platform so those don’t look like problems either. I’ll be fascinated to see what happens once people start using the system.