La TTC a réduit la vitesse des trains sur les lignes 1 et 2
TTC implements several subway reduced-speed zones on Lines 1, 2
After an annual inspection in January raised several maintenance issues, TTC staff put several reduced-speed zones on many parts of Lines 1 and 2. Nick Westoll reports.
Je suis tombé sur une zone de ralentissement sur la branche Finch de la ligne 1, en revenant de la station Eglinton Ouest. Les trains roulaient à peu près à la même vitesse que le train de Mascouche dans la cours de triage du CN. Les deux qu’on a entre les stations Sauve—Crémazie et Berri-UQAM—Champs-de-Mars sont presque rien en comparaison et je les trouve déjà frustrantes. Je serais vraiment fâché si j’avais à subir autant de zones de ralentissement dans notre métro.
Au moins, 2/3 de ces zones lentes seront réparées d’ici le début du service demain (vendredi) matin, mais il restera au moins 1/3 des zones jusqu’au mois de Mars environ.
Est-ce qu’on sait c’est quoi les causes de ces deux zones lentes? Est-ce un manque d’entretien ou D’Youville et la connexion avec la ligne 1?
Aussi, il y a une autre zone de ralentissement entre Villa-Maria et Vendôme direction Montmorency, mais pas de message officiel comme pour celui de Berri-UQAM.
Crémazie est fort probablement à cause de la voie de rangement entre les deux stations. Le train accélère dès qu’il la dépasse. C’est aussi possible que ce ne soit même pas classé comme zone de ralentissement tellement ça fait longtemps que le métro opère de cette façon dans cette zone.
Champs-de-Mars est seulement en direction Montmorency. La zone de ralentissement est parce que les trains Azur sont sensiblement plus lourds que l’ancien matériel roulant et endommagent les rails lorsqu’ils prennent la courbe à trop grande vitesse. Ces dommages sur les rail endommageaient à leur tour les frotteurs des trains responsables de leur alimentation en électricité.
Le STM affirme que le ralentissement entre Champ-de-Mars et Berri—UQAM est causé par les interrupteurs qui se connectent à la ligne 1 - verte et à la ligne 4 - jaune.
Et pourquoi est-ce que le train freine si brusquement entre Champs-de-Mars et Berri? Pas moyen de faire un ralentissement plus progressif?
Quand j’ai visité le centre de contrôle du métro l’année dernière, on m’avait dit que le ralentissement était parce que les trains Azur étaient trop lourds pour le sol en dessous du tunnel à cette section. Quelque chose comme ça…
Le système de signalisation de la ligne orange est antique. Les limites de vitesse sont assignées à des blocs et ne sont communiquées aux trains que lorsque qu’ils passent par dessus. Ils n’ont donc pas le temps d’anticiper et adoucir le freinage. Il faudra probablement attendre la mise à niveaux du système de signalisation sur la ligne pour régler ce problème.
10 km/h… Pas mal sûr que tu te fais dépasser par quelqu’un qui roule en quadriporteur. 
It’s because when the trains enter Vendôme at full speed at that platform, sometimes the winds from that train will blow in such a pattern that if a train on the opposite platform is boarding, it is really difficult to get on, because the wind was so strong.
I remember this happened to me once, and I sent a comment to the STM, and I noticed shortly after that trains started entering Vendôme at a slower speed, and it seemed to have fixed the problem.
It’s more a personal anecdote, but I’m guessing this is the reason.
C’est peut-être aussi pour la même raison que Berri, puisqu’il y a une courbe prononcée tout juste avant Vendôme venant de Villa-Maria.
Un long article de Bloomberg sur les répercussions des changements climatiques sur le transport ferroviaire en Europe
By Olivia Rudgard
February 15, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EST
Green
The air is hot inside the packed tram. There are no passengers, though. Just dozens of heaters — standing in the aisles and on the seats — meant to simulate them. Instead of rushing through a city street, the tram is stationary inside a weather tunnel in Vienna, some 600 miles from Duisburg, the German city where it’s due to spend its working life—once it passes a climate assault course.
This weather tunnel at Rail Tec Arsenal, on the outskirts of Austria’s capital, is the world’s largest climatic wind tunnel. It tests 15 trains each year for train and tram companies around the world, along with planes and cars. It is painted neon green inside, for reasons that have nothing to do with its function, but the color adds to the intense otherworldliness of the space.
Rail Tec Arsenal promises “weather as bad as you need,” and they mean it: The tunnel can get as cold as -45C and as hot as 60C [-49F to 140F]. Today, though, the chamber is heated to 31C [87.8F] with simulated wind rushing by at 12km/hr [7.5mph], to approximate gliding through the streets of Duisburg on a hot summer afternoon.
Europe’s railways, a safe, low-carbon technology that still carry a little glamor, are on the brink of a new era. Governments are banning some short-haul flights and cities are investing in mass transit to discourage driving. But a hotter world brings threats to rail. Heat bends tracks and sags overhead cables; rain floods lines and collapses embankments; storms topple trees and erosion eats away at seaside cliffs, leaving coastal tracks dangling in mid-air.
“A lot of national policy as well as European policy is to promote rail transport, which is pushing people towards taking more trains. But at the same time, there’s a lack of long-term adaptation,” says Tania Martha Thomas, a researcher at Climate Chance, a Paris-based NGO. “The pace of adaptation does not seem to be keeping up with the pace of observed changes in the climate.”
Duisburg’s old fleet dated back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and did not have air conditioning, but this new one does, says Andreas Offer, head of rail vehicle technology at DVG, Duisburg’s transport operator. Offer and his colleagues are monitoring the AC during the test at Rail Tec Arsenal to make sure it’s not drawing too much power, while still keeping the train cool. A more efficient system uses less energy and is less likely to fail in hot weather—exposing passengers to an uncomfortable and even dangerous situation.
Railways have to adapt. The alternative is a doom-loop of driving, flying and ever-more extreme climate change, says Noel Dolphin, head of UK projects at Furrer + Frey, a railway electrification company. “There’s a risk that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Extremes in climate make the railway unreliable, which moves people to cars, which increase carbon, which makes everything more unreliable, because we get more and more extreme weather.”
One July day in 2022, as summer heat broke records in Europe, hundreds of passengers boarded a train in Paris run by the French operator Thalys. They were headed to Brussels, but made it only a few miles. The train broke down, the air conditioning failed, and more than 600 people sat in 45C conditions for more than four hours before being evacuated. Some passengers collapsed; others forced doors open or smashed windows for air. Thalys later said the failure was linked to the high temperatures.
The Thalys debacle wasn’t the only incident that summer that laid bare the railway’s vulnerability to heat. Metal lines and cables are much hotter when the sun is shining on them, says Dolphin. Heat so extreme you could fry an egg out there; it’s a common metaphor, but in this case it’s literally true. At 40C, sun rays on metal tracks can raise the temperature of that metal to 70C, (at which eggs start to cook), or even hotter. Rails buckle and cables droop, disrupting the flow of electricity or blocking the line ahead. Trains grind to a halt.
Compensation to train operators for weather disruption, by cause
Source: Furrer + Frey
Other factors include snow, wind, lightning and cold
Heat, historically a relatively minor threat to European trains, is growing in importance. In the UK, operators get a payout from Network Rail, the infrastructure manager, to compensate them for lost income if services are disrupted or canceled by weather. In the past, most of these payouts have been linked to wind and flooding, but heat rose from 3% of claims between 2009 and 2014 to over 10% on average between 2015 and 2020.
One example is a section of railway from London to the west, towards Bristol and south Wales. The UK’s railways switched to diesel from steam over 50 years ago, and over the years some 38% of the total network has been converted again to run on electricity. Power comes from overhead lines or an electric “third rail,” which runs beneath the train. On this route, the first 12 miles leaving the UK capital were electrified in the 1990s, using equipment designed some 20 years earlier, under assumptions about the climate that are now wildly out of date. The rest was done around 2015, over 220 miles in total. Last year, Dolphin says, some 60% of all the failures were in that first 12 miles. (Network Rail declined to comment.) “It fails more, and more and more, and in every extreme weather event we have, it fails.”
Dolphin suggests modifying the “set up temperature,” which is generally the median air range temperature at which the railway works as designed. Like any metal, rails and overhead electrification wires expand in the heat (which can make them buckle or sag) and shrink in the cold (which can make them stretch). Engineers can adjust the set up temperature by changing the position and length of the wires or rail depending on the outside temperature, a relatively small task that be done even on some old lines. Moving the set-up temperature can better manage the risks and help keep trains running.
Coastal erosion is another risk. A £165 million ($208 million) project in Devon in southwest England built a seawall and secured a cliff with netting and nails to protect a railway line which had been rebuilt after it was washed away by a storm in February 2014. Network Rail considered moving the whole line inland but decided keeping and protecting it presented better value. Moving inland might still be the fate of the Maresme rail line perched on the coast north of Barcelona. It would cost billions of euros, and the thrill of a journey where the passenger can pretend they are gliding over the sea would be lost. Yet the move would eliminate the threat of ever stronger waves and storms.
After a pandemic dip in the EU, more people are taking the train. Passengers traveled almost as many miles in 2022 as they did in 2019, and new long-distance sleeper routes are planned. Rail has an excellent safety record in Europe, but it also suffers from reputational damage each time an incident occurs. A derailment in Scotland in 2020 killed three people, including the train’s driver and conductor. A later investigation by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch, a government agency, found that a drainage system had not been properly installed prior to the derailment. When almost a month’s rainfall came down in three hours, debris was washed onto the track. Climate change, the report said, “will exacerbate this risk still further.”
Resilience costs money. Analysis by the International Transport Forum, a global intergovernmental organization, found that by 2021, only six of its 66 member countries spent more than half of their transport infrastructure budget on rail.
Rail as a proportion of total inland transport infrastructure investment
The Scotland derailment was because drainage wasn’t being well monitored or maintained, says Dolphin. Observation is improving, though. Lidar and cameras mounted on trains are being used to scan every meter of the rail line, he says.
Repairs, though, can often lead to service disruptions and higher fares. “There’s a belief that the service is getting worse despite paying more. It’s almost like a perfect storm—the investment that is required at a time when there are unfortunately more service disruptions,” says Lorraine Blackwood, a former sustainability program manager at Network Rail, and an expert in nature-based solutions such as using plants and wetlands for drainage.
And added cost can lead to closures. Britain’s High Speed Two rail project, which originally connected London to the northern cities of Leeds and Manchester, was an exemplar of climate resilience and durability but also one of the most expensive railways in the world, costing £396 million per mile. Last year the UK government canceled part of the route because of the cost.
No one is quite sure how much it will cost to make everything ready. **“**It’s probably a very big bill,” says Lucie Anderton, head of sustainability at UIC, an international industry group for railway operators and infrastructure managers. It’s even harder, though, to estimate the price of doing nothing.
“We need to invest just to keep it as good as it is today, and we know that the climate is going to get worse,” Anderton says. “You need to both invest more to adapt and invest more to expand.”
Imaginez-vous le REM en panne pendant plusieurs mois? C’est pourtant ce qui se passe présentement de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique. 
Rennes : En panne, la ligne B du métro arrêtée au moins trois mois.
Le métro de Londres va donner des noms et des couleurs différentes à ses six lignes extérieures
By THE PRESS ASSOCIATION (Neil Lancefield, PA Transport Correspondent)
February 15, 2024 at 1:02 a.m. EST
The six names will be Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced.
They were chosen to honour and celebrate “different parts of London’s unique local history and culture”, he said.
The overhaul will require one of the biggest changes in the history of the capital’s Tube map.
London Overground lines have all been coloured orange on the map since the network was created in 2007 when Transport for London (TfL) took control of services on four suburban rail lines.
The network has expanded significantly since then, creating what has been described as a “mass of orange spaghetti” on maps, making it difficult for some passengers to work out what train they need.
Each route will be represented on Tube maps as parallel lines in different colours.
Mr Khan said: "This is a hugely exciting moment, transforming how we think about London’s transport network.
"Giving each of the Overground lines distinct colours and identities will make it simpler and easier for passengers to get around.
"In reimagining London’s tube map, we are also honouring and celebrating different parts of London’s unique local history and culture.
“The new names and colours have been chosen through engagement with passengers, historians and local communities, reflecting the heritage and diversity of our amazing city.”
Andy Lord, London’s transport commissioner, said: "The London Overground is one of the most successful railways in the country and has grown to carry more than three million customers a week.
"The network - which has grown quite considerably since 2007 - is currently shown as a complicated network of orange on maps.
"This can be confusing for customers less familiar with the network and could be a barrier for some wanting to use the London Overground.
"These new names and line colours will simplify the maps and routes for our customers, and it is hoped it will encourage more people to make the most of our services.
“It is also a great way to tell the stories of some important parts of London’s cultural diversity.”
The changes are estimated to cost £6.3 million, which will be paid for out of Mr Khan’s Greater London Authority budget.
The majority of this will go towards updating customer information such as redesigning and redisplaying maps across all Tube and London Overground stations, and issuing new versions in print and online.
Public address announcements will be re-recorded and around 6,000 station direction signs will be updated.
The rebranding will be rolled out over a week in the autumn.
John Bull, editor of transport website London Reconnections, said giving the lines names and colours is “an overdue change”.
He told the PA news agency: "One of the real benefits that the Overground has brought is the ability to drive traffic that isn’t local to interesting places in Zone 2, Zone 3 and beyond.
“But if it’s not a familiar journey you can’t just say ‘I’m going to get on the orange line’. You have to know how they interconnect.”
Mr Bull predicted that “people will grumble and moan about the names” but that has happened for “every single line that has been given a name over the years”.
He added: “Frankly, it’s nice to have some stuff that represents things that have changed the lives of Londoners, among the references to queens that have tended to accrue up until now.”
The most recent major naming of a rail line in London was the Elizabeth line after Queen Elizabeth II, which opened in May 2022.
The names and colours for London Overground lines will be:
La carte actuelle avec ses lignes orange
Le métro de Renne, c’est pas une sorte de translor?
La ligne 1 c’est un VAL (métro léger sur pneus, avec barres de guidage) et la ligne 2 c’est un NeoVAL, métro à gabarit un peu plus large et avec rail de guidage central. C’est une solution similaire à Translohr, mais pas le NeoVAL appartient à Siemens alors que Translohr appartient à NTL qui est détenue à 51% par Alstom.
Non c’est un NeoVal, le successeur du bon VAL français. J’ai eu l’occasion de l’essayer l’année dernière et on se rapproche davantage d’un people mover… Perso, je n’ai pas trouvé mon voyage très “smooth” comparé à un VAL classique. Ça vibrait beaucoup même.
Câline, j’ai la fâcheuse tendance à répondre sans lire les commentaires suivants… Désolé je n’avais vu que tu avais déjà répondu à @paulwillyjean
