VIA Rail

[ijmorlan]

In my experience, the boarding procedure is mostly held up by the backlog caused by people climbing the stairs with their 3 huge pieces of luggage, and then the hallway blockage while they stash these into the luggage rack.

That, and the eternal wait while they operate the wheelchair lift.

Oh how i wish we could have level boarding.

I’ve heard various claims, but never anything that made any actual sense. The two claims I can remember are:

1) Expense: but given how much is being spent on Union Station right now, this is an absurd thing to bring up at that location, and elsewhere it doesn’t need to be much more than a wooden deck structure such as you might put at the back of your house.

2) Freight trains: irrelevant at Union Station and Ottawa; and at other locations gauntlet track, sidings, platform extenders, or bridging plates could be used.

On top of which, we don’t necessarily have to suddenly go to level boarding everywhere: it can be a platform-at-a-time upgrade. Also, a significant benefit would be had even by just raising the platform to the GO level-entry level. This would eliminate the need for those little stepstools and significantly reduce the height required to be climbed.

Overall, the inefficiency of Via’s station operations is unbelievable. How did things run in the 1940s when there were huge numbers of trains? I don’t think their current Union Station procedures could possibly have worked with that much traffic.