GO Transit

[Bytor]

It won't accomplish the stated goals.

Even if you grade separate Silver Junction west of Georgetown, that whole CN-owned bit (the Halton Sub) from there to Bramalea where Metrolinx ownership resumes has too few tracks to accommodate both freight and passenger traffic. Most of it is only 2 tracks, except for about 4km between Brampton and Bramalea GO stations. There's simply not enough to share to make #2WADGO possible.

How many freights do they run? We’re only talking about one passenger train per hour in each direction. One track should be able to handle a train every 30 minutes — one freight and one passenger per hour. If not, we’re doing something wrong and need to do a field trip to Europe to see how it’s done. We seem to need way more tracks here than they do. I believe the issue at the junction has to do with crossing movements, not with the inherent capacity of two tracks in the absence of conflicts between tracks.

Part of the problem is speed. Passenger trains run a lot faster than 2km long freight trains.

Another part of it is rail traffic control and how that affects capacity. Rail lines are divided into blocks and a one train cannot enter a block until the train ahead of it has cleared the block. Block sizes vary based on how long the trains are and how fast they are moving and are made so that a train can throw on the brakes and stop before leaving their block and not crash into the one in the next block. Trains are scheduled into time slots to use a block based on when that block becomes clear.

Freight trains that are not only longer than passenger trains with but also take more to slow down means that block sizes are larger and travel more slowly than passenger trains which means that a train takes longer to clear it, and all that adds up to mean fewer time slots.

If it were only passenger trains it would be doable because the blocks would shorter and the trains would clear them more quickly and you thus have more time slots, but when you're talking about really long freight trains that need huge blocks and move through them so slow, the next timeslot through a block might be 2 hours later instead of 10 minutes later with only passenger trains.

In TL;DR speak, that's a capacity issue.

Now a grade separations might help trains move through some blocks faster, but if you look at the aerial view of Georgetown GO to Silver, you'll see that it's dedicated track from the station to the Guelph Sub to get to Kitchener. Google maps regular view gets the tracks wrong, BTW, and doesn't show that dedicated track from the Georgetown GO station. There's not really that much contention there so capacity improvements from a Silver grade separation would be limited. To quote somebody with far more rail knowledge than I "Grade separating anything at Silver either means you rebuild the entirety of Georgetown GO or you construct the biggest white elephant in GO's history."

This stretch of CN track from Bramalea to Georgetown is one of their busiest sections and all their traffic from Québec and the Maritimes must go through it to get to the USA, and vice versa. All of that freight traffic (which is growing, BTW) has to squeeze down to two tracks past Mount Pleasant GO is difficult at best, which is why GO hourly frequency has stopped there on the line. They don't have the time slots to make hourly passenger trains possible to Kitchener without addressing the capacity issues cause by not enough tracks.

So, yes, it is the "inherent capacity" of those two tracks which is the biggest limiting factor preventing 2WADGO to Kitchener.