Apparently, two coaches were enough in "the future".Unfortunately, I don't know the backstory of this photo emailed to me. The sign says "GO Urban"??? in what is the GO Transit stylized font. Perhaps GO Transit was to be one big monorail along the lake? Close enough.
13 comments:
It looks like Ontario place so it was probably just the parking shuttle.
GO once planned to operate Scarborough RT trains on the Lakeshore lines.
Ahhhhhh, Ontario Place in the good old days before they tore the Forum down.
I guess this is where the nerds come out...
GO-Urban was a plan for what would eventually morph into the Scarborough RT. It would have featured automated little trains - like the ones in that doctored photo - and had them running on various routes at ridiculous frequencies. And to top it all off, it was to be a Maglev. It was supposed to be cheaper than a subway, but still offer a comparable experience.
Alas, when the Ontario Government of the time (early 1970s) put the idea out to bids, only one company responded - the German corporation Krauss-Maffei. They started planning a testing and demonstration system and even went so far as to start building the tracks at the CNE. Then shit went pear-shaped, and the project was cancelled in 1973. The design team at the Ontario end stayed together and went on to design such wonderful things as the Rek-Vee small bus and the ICTS - what is used on the Scarborough RT.
Nerd!!! ;-)
I absolutely love railheads.
*ahem* Guilty as charged.
Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go back to sorting out my pocket protectors by colour and ink blots.
Fascinating stuff if you ask me..
Thanks Dan!
Hahahahah it's Doug Ford's new monorail he mentioned awhile ago, the one that was going to go from Union to a new super-shopping centre or something ludicrous!
Does it go to north haverbrook?
Oh Dan, I'll bet you look hot with your white short-sleeve shirt and plastic rim glasses with tape on the bridge of the nose part.
Actually Dan, there were 18 responses! These were whittled down to four, and Krauss-Maffei won in the final down-select.
The maglev won it, because K-M said that it eliminated all problems with snow and ice. Sadly it turned out the trains had no problems here, but the tracks did! The tracks had to physically move to do switching, and they froze up like crazy. This was not unfixable, of course, but the other reason they won was that the German federal government was paying for technical development, and they pulled funding in a switch of government.
There was a Canadian entry, from Hawker-Siddeley. It used rubber-wheeled trains that could automatically "flock" into trains and then split apart again when they reached out into the burbs. That way you can funnel lots of traffic from widely spread stations into the downtown lines. Dunno if it would have worked - the French tried a software-only version of this in the Aramis system, and it failed miserably.
Oh BTW the line in the picture was the test line. It would have run along the top of the CNE where the streetcar loops are now, then crossed over to the then-new Ontario Place. The idea was they would later connect that to a line running along the current GO corridor.
The cool thing about the design is that it operated like a subway when it was downtown, running at maybe 30 km/h. Then when it got onto the mainlines it accelerated up to about 75 km/h. So it could be used for both urban and inter-urban use.
When it died and they did ICTS in its place, the train had to get larger in order to support the same level of ridership. That meant it couldn't be used for small runs like the Ontario Place track. So instead they used it on the Scarborough RT.
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