(The following article by Kevin McGran was posted on the Toronto Star website on January 30.)
TORONTO — These are not happy days aboard Toronto’s inter-regional train system. Passengers are frustrated with the endless cancellations and delays, waiting on cold platforms for trains that sometimes never come.
GO is frustrated with CN and CP, whose crews run GO’s trains and don’t pass information along to the passengers. And rail workers are frustrated with winter, trudging out into the snow to the frozen switches that are causing most of the delays.
“This is a problem for the entire northern hemisphere in the civilized world where you have snow accumulation,” said GO general manager Gary McNeil.
It was another horrible day for GO commuters yesterday, frozen switches wreaking havoc on the Georgetown line and Lakeshore West, with morning trains running 10 minutes to nearly an hour behind schedule.
“This last month has been abysmal,” said Don Dowdell, one of dozens of commuters who contacted the Star yesterday. “The lame excuse that this is somehow weather-related is just that, a lame excuse.”
GO’s trains have been delayed more than 500 times since Jan. 1, almost 200 times more than last January. Almost half those delays were attributed to the weather, said spokesperson Ed Shea. And many others were traced to problems with CN’s computer system. But passengers don’t want to hear about frozen switches.
“If they say they have switch problems, it’s not because technology doesn’t exist, it’s because somebody either isn’t using it or doesn’t maintain it,” Dowdell said. “It’s not rocket science to keep switches operating when the temperature gets cold.”
No, it’s not rocket science. In the old days, crews would pour some fuel on top of frozen switches, light a match and, presto, instant melt. They don’t do that anymore.
“It was a quick melt that often caused more problems that it solved,” said Sam Spares, director of Toronto Terminal Railways, the private company that operates the rail system between Strachan Ave. and the Don River.
The new technology consists of hot-air blowers.
They work like a gas furnace for “points” ? the rods that are moved from side-to-side by switches, directing trains to the proper track. A nozzle blows hot air to melt snow and ice.
Each hot-air unit costs about $30,000. So far, about 40 switches in the TTR’s area have the blowers. But 222 do not, Spares said. GO Transit is in the process of upgrading, but it will take at least 10 years to put hot-air blowers on the 80 most-used switches.
And even the hot-air units aren’t the perfect answer, because they may take longer to melt chunks of ice than someone clearing the blockage by hand.
`The crews themselves know the customers are … complaining about them.’
Gary McNeil, GO manager
“We don’t have an absolute solution to winter,” said Spares. “When you get a snowfall, you shovel out your driveway and get it all cleaned out, and then the snow plow comes by and you have to go shovel again.
“It’s the same with switches. When a train goes over a switch, sometimes it’s pushing snow, sometimes you get ice falling off the bottom. If a piece of ice happens to fall into the point, you got to go dig it out.
“There’s no technology out there that’s going to instantaneously melt ice.”
January is traditionally GO’s worst month for weather delays. But CN also had some major glitches with its dispatch control system, bringing all trains on all lines to a standstill. That caused headaches for CN’s freight department as well as VIA and GO. CN fixed those problems by Jan. 12, but then the bad weather hit.
“If you take CN’s computer glitches out of the equation, it’s just a normal bad January,” McNeil said.
Then there’s the effect of rising ridership.
“Part of the problem is that we are running more trains than we used to,” Spares said. “When you delay one, you now delay multiple. It’s like gridlock on the highways; if you get one lane shut down, it’s amazing how it will back things up.”
Some passengers say they would be more understanding if GO would only tell them what’s going on.
“My biggest complaint with the GO service is not making announcements,” said Carmela Chiodo, who comes in from Hamilton. “Since we are paying over $3,000 a year for the service, why not service us once in a while?”
McNeil said he understands that frustration. He and GO chair Gordon Chong plan to meet with the presidents of CN and CP to see if they can find a way for the freight crews that run the passenger cars to act in a customer-friendly manner.
“The crews themselves know the customers are bitching and complaining about them. They don’t like it, either,” McNeil said.
One thing all agree on is that trains won’t move unless it’s safe.
“If that switch point isn’t in the right position, you won’t get a (green) light because there’s something wrong with the switch,” said Spares. “It’s a very fine line on these switches and locking up in a safety mechanism. In minus 22, if you get a thin layer of ice, that’s enough to stop it from allowing you to get a signal.”
If the points on the switch don’t lock, a crew member has to get off the train to find out why. It’ll take that person time to plod up to half a kilometre through the snow, a few minutes to fix it and more time to plod back.
“We have a quarter-inch rule,” Spares said. “If those points are open a quarter inch, that’s enough to allow a train to go the wrong way.”