ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

Of course at that point you're exceeding the limits of the region's Traction Electrification System:

From Schedule 15-2 Article 6, 6.4 Traction Power Systems (TPS) Design Requirements, a) ii) A. :

The design of the TES shall validated be [sic] based on a computer-aided load flow simulation. Operation of the trains along the alignment shall be simulated and all necessary parameters for the electrification system design verified and confirmed. The ultimate train length is a two-car train. All simulations shall use the ultimate train operating at the minimum projected headway of five (5) minutes, under normal and individual substation outage conditions, with the cars loaded to their normal service capacity of 200 passengers. Under normal operating conditions two trains should be able to start simultaneously at any station stop and maintain their rated acceleration. Under contingency conditions of one substation out of service, one ultimate train should be able to start at any passenger station in the affected area and maintain its rated acceleration as if the system was operating with all substations on-line. However, under these same conditions, two ultimate trains shall be able to start simultaneously at a reduced acceleration and operating level.

It's interesting that this is validated through simulation only.  It seems like it should be easy to test in a practical situation--simply setup the specific required scenarios, and measure voltage drop, heat load at substations, vehicle performance, etc.

I would be curious as to how much margin there is.  There was an article I read a while back whose author (who claimed to have electrical engineering credentials) was claiming that traction power systems on new LRT systems like ours were massively over provisioned leading to more wires (double wires) and resultingly, heavier more expensive cat poles.

This seems quite believable to a non-expert such as myself given that TTC is running similar vehicles with lower headways (but only single trains I believe) on a much lower gauge system, which I would expect would have lower capacity.  Now I'm not an electrical engineer so I cannot know for sure, but it does seem curious how much more substantial our system is than TTC streetcar wires.