01-18-2022, 04:44 PM
(01-18-2022, 04:29 PM)jeffster Wrote:(01-18-2022, 02:41 PM)Bytor Wrote: We were warned, and rail is extremely easy to keep keep clear of snow. Even light rail. It wasn't snowing that fast as it took several hours before the 4cm had accumulated that the plows wait for before they start clearing the roads.
If GrandLinq/Keolis wasn't out there running a tram or or two all night to keep the tracks clear, that is incompetence on their part as we can easily expect multiple 5+ centimetre snow falls in a season, even in this day and age of climate change.
Also, how were the City snow plows allowed to just plow the snow over the LRT tracks? As easy as it is for light rail to keep up with falling snow, there's still such a thing as "too deep" for a tram. That is incompetence on the City's part to not make sure that didn't happen. It's also a bit more incompetence for GrandLinq to not expect such might happen and not have a rapid response contingency available.
I think in some cases the stuck vehicles was likely due to snow bank created by plow operators. Though in one of the cases, the unit stuck at Market Station, it was southbound, and there was very deep snow in front of it, but not from the a plow.
So I am guessing I saw these trains just after they started running again, and it doesn't look like that the tracks were cleared, at all.
I was talking to someone that works in transit in the USA, and his thought that our trains are too low to the ground, and that was most likely the issue.
"Too low to the ground"...they are low floor trains, that's a feature, not a mistake.
But low floor trains come with compromises, ground clearance is one of them, but one that I suspect is not really a big deal. If the snow was piled so high that ground clearance was an issue, I suspect there would be other problems with pushing through it.