generalcanada
Senior Member
FYI guys MX has said they are 100% not touching EMUS's theyre taking the bi-levels with electric locomotives.
BI levels are here to stay for decades
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- Thread starter drum118
- Start date
BI levels are here to stay for decades
Richard White
Senior Member
Source?
RU479
Active Member
I doubt this. There will eventually come a point where the system will be more integrated for EMU use, and the majority of the BiLevels would be past their service life.
When that time is and whether MX can get it done on time is a different story, but I doubt they’ll never use EMUs.
UD2
Active Member
Technically, 12 bi-levels with 2 electric locomotives set up one on each end is an EMU. So never say never.
rbt
Senior Member
I agree that BiLevels will eventually be replaced but I'm not expecting that to occur during this 25-year operations contract. This contract has a very large construction component; every section of every GO corridor will be touched in some way.
An operations/manitenance contract starting in 2050 will likely include a rolling stock refresh, driverless operations, and higher frequencies but significantly less track construction.
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cplchanb
Senior Member
generalcanada
Senior Member
this all but confirms that no EMUS will be bought
RU479
Active Member
rbt
Senior Member
In 2050? Absolutely. Any tech that can drive a car, truck, or bus through crowded streets (manufacturing is largely the issue for Cruise and Waymo now, not the tech itself) will be able to safely drive a passenger train too. A combination of lidars/cameras on the train, at level crossings, and moving block signalling will enable it.
The current ~185 level crossings will be mostly grade separated by that point as well.
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TRONto
Active Member
IIRC, driverless train tech was tested out in Australia (mining). The company said there is no point as the labour cost for their trains was negligible compared to the total cost of running the train.
crs1026
Superstar
This does not mean that their people are "driving" the trains. The Australian ore trains are highly automated.
Our railways are pretty close to that already, between PTC and the onboard "Trip Optimiser" technology..
Similar to AV's, these technologies work well 80% of the time and horribly the rest of the time. But by 2050.... that may be old hat. And by 2050, the GO network will look an awful like the TTC subway network, where driverless trains are already effectively in operation.
- Paul
SashaLemon
Active Member
So Alstom is the rolling stock partner and they won't be able to sell any of their fancy EMUs, right...
It would make so much sense to just STOP buying any additional bi-levels, and start phasing in EMUs.
It would make so much sense to just STOP buying any additional bi-levels, and start phasing in EMUs.
crs1026
Superstar
Or maybe it doesn’t. It’s quite the spreadsheet exercise to balance out the life expectancy of the existing fleet, the lifetimes costs and savings of introducing an EMU fleet, and the fleet size required given a future state that may have a different mix of heavy-load peak service trains versus 24x7 service.
One has to assume that some use of EMU’s will be attractive, but whether that accelerates the retirement of some bilevels or whether both EMUs and standard coaches will need to be acquired is a number-crunching exercise . If the peak never returns to its previous level, there may be a surplus in available coaches with useful years of service remaining. Deferring introduction of EMUs until that surplus is gone might be the cheaper scenario - and the game is all about delivering at lowest cost over a very long contract term.
- Paul
RU479
Active Member
My theory is that when MX eventually moves over to EMUs, they’ll want to use single level EMUs, which is why rn they aren’t switching to EMUs.
Considering how the GO system will be more like the TTC network by 2045-2050, double decker trains would only makes things less efficient. So they keep the BiLevels and have the electric locomotives for now, and then move over to single level EMUs when the time arrives. This negates the need of having to replace the BiLevels with double decker EMUs that’ll eventually get replaced by single level EMUs.
Considering how the GO system will be more like the TTC network by 2045-2050, double decker trains would only makes things less efficient. So they keep the BiLevels and have the electric locomotives for now, and then move over to single level EMUs when the time arrives. This negates the need of having to replace the BiLevels with double decker EMUs that’ll eventually get replaced by single level EMUs.
T3G
Senior Member
In what way would it be more efficient to have single deck trains?