King-Victoria Transit Hub

[danbrotherston]

I remember thinking about the absurdity of having no level-entry platform at the Via station when any contractor could, in a single weekend, build something the size of a backyard deck that would provide a ramp up to at least one door of the train. Obviously not as good as a full platform, but such a significant payoff for such a trivial expenditure.

It's sadly not the straightforward. Most of our passenger platforms are on tracks that serve freight trains. The freight trains are allowed to be wider, so a platform that provided level boarding of a Via train could have freight trains collide with it. I believe that's part of why Go uses the low platforms, because they're compatible with freight loading gauges.

There's also a lack of standardization of platform height and spacing. Go and Via have different standards here, and UPX might be a third? And that's just southern Ontario, I'm sure there's other norms elsewhere in Canada. This is something that just needs to get standardized on a national level, probably by adopting US norms (which again, isn't entirely standardized, but the northeastern US has some norms). But the logical standardization would be a high platform, and given the massive amount of legacy Go rolling stock... it's just not that easy to switch.

Of course, we don't really plan ahead, or rather, this kind of feature is never prioritized. If we had, we could have built the current station with sufficient room to separate freight and passenger traffic, (although possibly there is still room for a gauntlet track).

Even in Toronto, where there are no freight trains, and on platforms which only service GO trains they aren't building for level boarding anyway.

But the "no standardisation" isn't actually as big an issue as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's better if the platform exactly matches the height of the train car, but every inch closer to it is an improvement. The GO accessibility platforms are lower than Via Rail, but using them across the entire platform would certainly eliminate the need for a stool placed in front of the stairs up to the train, which would make boarding easier--if we were willing to restrict or move freight away from the platform edge.