ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[trainspotter139]

Wishful thinking?

I mean, I honestly do not understand the purpose of the restriction there...it's ridiculous...but I'm not a railway engineer, so I'm sure there's a good reason why a train can't do more than a jogging pace through an entirely segregated straight right of way next to a track where trains go four times the speed in the opposite direction.

Maybe there is something wrong with the track? It’s hard to imagine what would require such an extreme slowdown.

A similar case previously occurred on the southbound track approaching Erb St. They would slow to a crawl ahead of the switch for the freight crossover, then speed up a little before slowing down as they approached the crossing at Erb. I actually watched one and the slowdown appeared to be intended to apply to the switch itself, so I suspect there was an issue with the switch. What it was I can’t imagine; and if they were concerned about the switch not switching properly or staying in the proper location I think a better approach would have been to send out a crew every morning to clamp or bolt it in the LRT operating position, then reverse the procedure before the freight went through in the evening. But regardless, eventually it was fixed and while they still proceed rather slowly through the Erb St. crossing they at least approach it at a somewhat more reasonable speed.

Although a lot of this stuff is somewhat mysterious. I recently watched a video discussing an incident in Britain where a passenger train went through a slow order 100mph over the limit, at full track speed of about 125mph rather than the slow limit of 25mph (numbers might be slightly off, but not hugely off; it went through at 5 times the speed limit). It was a temporary slow order, not a curve or something like that. What is weird is that the limit for freight trains was 125mph! Indeed, the signage, with two numbers on it, one for passenger and one for freight, was a factor in the incident. I don’t understand how passenger trains could need to slow to 25mph while it’s still considered perfectly safe for freight to blow through at 125mph.

There's nothing wrong with the track there that is limiting the speed. It is, in fact, entirely based on the limitations of ATP. ATP is entirely limited by the human driver factor. Had we gone with an ATC system (which is much more expensive to implement) like what is being done on Line 5 Eglinton in Toronto that large section of crawling along at 15 km/h wouldn't exist since ATC essentially drives the train in ATC enabled sections. The curve speed limit for the Hayward section is 15 km/h. With ATC the system could calculate in real time and then implement the required braking to get the train to decelerate to 15 km/h before a point about 15m before entering the curve. ATP, since it's entirely dependent on human factors, requires a large buffer zone before the start of where speed restrictions are required to account for a driver failing to acknowledge the speed limit change, penalty grace period and potential subsequent penalty braking. The larger the change in speed limit, the larger that buffer zone must be.