ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[trainspotter139]

I would guess that a maintenance person using equipment on the tracks is much cheaper in terms of labour costs than an LRV driver.

I don't think it is that, the snow removal was ongoing during the daytime when LRVs were running. I suspect that Grandlinq feels that snow removal is necessary even when LRVs are running, I am not certain why they change their opinion.

That being said, I must agree, it seems like much of the embedded track does not need to be embedded....we even have weird scenarios like on Hayward where the track switches between ballasted to embedded and back twice in a few hundred meter span.

I'm not a railway engineer, but I am guessing much of this has to do with blindly applying standards and processes without thinking or contextualizing. It's the same way we got a King/Moore intersection seemingly designed to kill cyclists.

I think it was more of a "if we don't clear this wet, sloppy sh*t now it will freeze up and cause headaches later." They were absolutely running trains to keep the tracks clear but there was also a few spots where road plows were throwing a bunch of thick wet snow or ice chunks onto the side running tracks and then the LRVs would just push it back onto the road.