During the May – September OTrain shutdown period, lots of renovations are being done to some of the stations. Carling is shown here undergoing major repairs to trackside edge. Like Bayview, the lighting is gone. It appears new waiting structures will also be provided.
This is a joke, there should never have been a shutdown. All of this work could be done during the day and the rest at night like how most railways do maintenance. The only reasons this was not done during when the railway was operating was for reasons of legal liability. I have worked with transit railways and mainline line railways most of my adult life, this is a sad story about a city that does not want to admit they need rail people not just road people. This a prime example of road planners and enginners trying to plan and maintain a railway. You can’t do it the same way as if you are building a ROAD. It’s good the work is being done but, the picture Eric showed of the work done at Carling could have been complete in less than 2 days and I am being generous. Passing tracks of the length being planned for the O-Train could have been done in days. It’s taken over 2 months for them to lay new ties by the side of the track. My guess is they are doing the bridge, signal and tunnel work before building the passing sidings and station improvements. Real railways would do the station and track work first because it is easy, quick work that you could get out of the way fast. Leaving more time for the more complex bridge and tunnel work. Signal work can be done concurently with the track work. Any work being done at Walkley Yard could have been done while all this was going on or before the new Lint 41 Cordina Trainsets arrived and the O-Train was still runing. The problem is now if they have problems with the more complex work the simple stuff can’t or might not get done on time. Sorry about the rant but, it burns me watching people who build roads for a living planning the work for real rail contractors. This happened before back when they shutdown the O-Train in 2003 for the summer to take ourt the old sectioned rail and install continously welded rail. The city would not let the contractor, Rail Term weld the rail at night or very early in the morning before the hot summer sun caused the 500 metre sections of rail to heat and expand. By forcing them to weld during the day, the city inspectors were shocked to come back in the next morning with cracked welds as well as twisted and kinked rail. That project was needlessly late because the people in charge of making the schedule did not understand the basics of 160+ years of rail and track construction do’s and don’ts. Little rules like, do not weld or secure steel rail during the hotest part of a summer day let the rail cool down or at the least make allowances for possible steel contraction during the night. I have been told sevral times that the city really does not have any rail people of it’s own. Yes the city could hire a few but that would reveal to everyone that yes, we do have the need for engineers and planners that do more than work on asphalt.
I have only a passing familiarity with actual rail work ( I worked at the CTC on railway relocation, and TC on urban transit projects) and so I am reluctant to say much about how the city runs its railway. But it does seem awfully eager to shut it down; and work proceeds angonizingly slowly. But then I find the city awfully slow on other capital projects too — largely, i think, because all projects represent costs and risks for the city, whereas for a private railway projects represent revenue opportunities and potential. This goes for roads, bridges, rec complexes, city housing … there may be some merit to the notion of leaving capital to the capitalists. More than once I mentally compare the city, and similar agencies providing housing or hospitals, to the awful mess in cuba, or east germany, venezuela, or city-sponsored sports stadiums …