01-19-2022, 06:27 PM
(01-18-2022, 05:23 PM)ac3r Wrote:(01-18-2022, 04:44 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: "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.
I don't even get why the hell we went with low floor trains. They make sense for trams and streetcars where passengers get on and off on the street or platforms no higher than a normal curb, but for our LRT? They still require platforms - in our case ours are at least 30cm+. We could have just purchased normal trains and raised the platforms, though I suspect one reason why is because we felt compelled to purchase from Bombardier, who completely screwed up our order with delays and resulted in 11 of them about to fall apart until Bombardier mechanics came to repair them anyway.
I wonder...if it wasn't for Bombardier, maybe our LRT would have launched on its start date rather than something like 3 years later and then wouldn't have the welding issues that caused even more problems. And if we went with non-low floor trains, perhaps 20-25cm of snow wouldn't cripple our entire rapid transit system.
In this case it wasn't just 25cm of snow, it was slushy-packed-hard-and-refroze-crunched-up-by-traffic snow that was plowed onto the tracks in addition on and of the fallen fluff. That's some heavy crap to push through.
Without that, based on operations of other systems in snowy countries, one tram, maybe two, operating through night would have been sufficient to keep the tracks cleared as it was all light fluff and the deposition rate wasn't so quick that in two hours it would have been more than a tram could handle. Call in a couple of afternoon-shifters for 1am and they do three loops 1am, 3am 5am. At that point regular service starts and you're good. The afternoon people get 6 hours or more before they need ot get up and come back in.