gavinshearer.com

« "Storm Begin A Life Of Independence" | Main | Support The Thomas Turner Scholarship Fund This Wednesday »

May 31, 2009

Who Drives The Vancouver SkyTrain?

From the "I love YouTube" department - the Vancouver SkyTrain people have a nifty, 7-minute clip up on the site ("Who drives the Vancouver SkyTrain?") that showcases the SkyTrain operations center and different places in the system (e.g., SkyBridge).

It's produced by the agency (and, admittedly, a little cheesy), but it's pretty interesting stuff for transit geeks.

Cool side note: SkyTrain uses a live, "rolling block" system to prevent the trains from crashing in to one another. Since the system only dates from the '80s, they were able to embed a digital tracker that knows where every train is at any given moment in time. This allows SkyTrain to keep far more trains running concurrently than does the traditional, 1900-era "fixed block" system, which uses a rough estimation of a train's position
(and must therefore have a bigger window between trains to prevent crashes). It's a terrific advantage, and it's being retrofitted into other systems (e.g., the 100-year-old NYC subway is in the process of switching from fixed-block to rolling-block to squeeze more throughput from their tracks).

(H/T to the Buzzer Blog for the link!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at May 31, 2009 12:31 PM. Posted to Transit.

« "Storm Begin A Life Of Independence" | Main | Support The Thomas Turner Scholarship Fund This Wednesday »