Wayside Observer

For burgers, I'll eat Harvey's, Hero Burger, and South St. Burger Company. Other fast food? Mary Brown's or Popeye's chicken, but that's about it except for bacon sandwiches at the St. Lawrence Market. There actually used to be two places that had those there. Carousel Bakery and they'll let everyone believe that the pemeal bacon sandwich is exclusively their thing but there also used to be another place in the southwest corner called the Olympic Torch and I liked their bacon sandwiches a bit better because I preferred their buns. Olympic Torch is long gone though but it used to be where the Buster's Sea Cove place is now. Tonight I cooked the remaining two porck chops in the package with a different rub but it burns at very low temperatures and I managed to zorch it. The chops were ok and edible but really should've been done in the oven on a very low setting with a bit of running time. Oh well.

All he said was that his source had differing information and gave the as-then reported fleet numbers. You're getting all worked up and passive-aggressive over that? Nobody should be made to feel like they have to walk around like they're on eggshells over something so minor.

McDonald’s: The banquet that Donald Trump served the Clemson University football team after winning the championship and a staple of foamers chasing buses everywhere, is not allowed in my house. Instead, we have pork sirloin end chops pan fried with steamed broccoli and garlic toast using up the end of a head of broccoli and a loaf of bread respectively.

I was wondering the same thing a few days ago so I looked around but I couldn't turn anything up. If there is a date set, it hasn't been announced to the public yet.

TTC electric bus when the roll sign just doesn't roll: https://chuckmantorontonostalgia.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/photo-toronto-bay-street-with-atrium-in-background-note-sign-for-lichee-garden-relocated-from-elizabeth-street-ttc-trolley-bus-which-could-use-a-wash-1988/

https://www.caasco.com/advocacy/worst-roads/2022-results I guess it's for good reason Barton St. tops the CAA's list of worst roads in Ontario. Any idea which section of Barton St. specifically that wrecked the bus?

But Peter Witts on Lakeshore isn’t a bus.

I saw a bus. Oh yes I did. I totally saw a bus. You gotta see a bus. Buses are very important. The importance of buses cannot be overstated. A day without buses would be like a day without sun. It's either bus or bust and i f you can't have a bus, why even get out of bed in the morning? TTC 8043. 80 Queensway. On Lakeshore Rd.

The Toronto Star had an op-ed to that effect yesterday: Queen and King streetcars show Toronto why the subway is the better way: it works (cached version) The first line: "It’s tough being a supporter of public transit right now." That pretty much captures the current situation with the TTC in a nutshell. I was thinking about the Eglinton Crosstown line importing practices from streetcar operations when I stepped outside a little bit ago and got blasted with the cold. Are they going to be opening all doors at every stop on the surface as well? And let all the heat/air conditioning out every time the way they do on the streetcars?

So much for having a fast European style LRT and take advantage of all that infrastructure and private right of way to blow by the road traffic. The idea was nice while it lasted.

Don't forget the ALRV. It was tested and then parked. The reasoning that I heard was that they were afraid the CLRVs would be such a maintenance headache of their own that nobody wanted to try to keep the ALRV running. This is a shame since the ALRV was delivered as a running car. Is this showing up as a mechanical problem or an electrical problem?

Was this while the CLRV windows were still sealed? Either way, the big thing the CLRV cars benefited from was a 100% reliance on resistive heating since there was no controller waste heat to recover so they still had heat even at a standstill. PCCs sucked in a traffic jam because there was no heat being thrown off the controller and it all came down to the aux heat elements which weren't enough by themselves.* Plus they weren't sealed all that great until the A15 rebuild. Then they were sealed a little too well which helped kill motor generators quickly. If you look at one of the last (door side? Memory getting fuzzy) windows on the A15s, it's rigged so it can't be closed all the way and it stays open a crack at the bottom to allow air movement so the MG set wouldn't be loaded down trying to push air into the car when it had nowhere to go. *Except for maybe the TCRT cars. I saw one of those torn apart a few years ago and TCRT installed some serious kilowatts of strip heating but then again those ran in Minnesota and that place gets winter so bad that Bob Dylan said it's too cold to get into any mischief there.

Part of me wonders if this is really what the public wants or if it's what the transit industry has decided the public is going to be given. It's probably a bit of both. I totally agree though, apart from my preference for the CLRV interior over the Flexity. There definitely was something special back in the day during a crappy winter commute, getting into that warm transit vehicle and collapsing into a seat was just perfect, enjoying the trip except for dreading the end (sometimes stretching it out in different ways if time permitted) and having to go back outside into the elements. Since we're into the Christmas season: One year, my family's Christmas gathering was at my aunt and uncle's house in the Annex so my family plus grandparents who had come down from Montreal drove over for it. The problem was, the temperature dropped once the sun went down and all the slush froze and trapped our car. My dad and uncle and I couldn't get it freed up so my uncle drove the rest of my family, my grandparents, and all the gifts home in his car while my dad and I took the TTC because there wasn't enough room for all of us. That was a nice unexpected late night winter PCC -> Gloucester -> Trolleybus -> Trudge through the snow trip home. That warm PCC car was fantastic after being outside trying everything we could think of to get the family car unstuck from the spot it was frozen to. None of the current TTC vehicles really come across as warm, cosy, and inviting on a winter's day to my mind which is unfortunate. The part that puzzles me is that since you're paying for them to be finished inside and out regardless, the marginal cost of picking a decent colour palette is minimal as is the cost of having an industrial designer go over the interior and exterior, especially when you consider that against the total cost of a many millions of dollars vehicle order. The excessively utilitarian design as an exercise in frugality isn't really saving all that much money in the grand scheme of things.

I'd heard that through the grapevine a year or two ago, right before the pandemic started. Certainly there's a lot of benefit to picking the best of the lot when you have more than one example of something to be the primary machine. Why work harder to try and whip another one into shape when you've already got one that is? I had a practical, real life example a week ago. There's this cluster of three very tempermental machines at work and the #2 unit has been running in service for months. Someone told me I need to put everything #1 and I had to explain reality to the guy. All three machines are capable of running in service. They are extremely tempermental. Moving from #2 to #1 when there is no need to is all risk and no benefit so it's better to leave them as-is. I pretty much said that's how it was going to be unless a compelling reason to do so emerged during maintenance and left it at that. Anyways, HCRR could validate the conclusions about 4039 vs. the others and do some burn in testing to see if the expected trend emerges. Well, since I've so very kindly donated the operational justification for doing an in-crowd runfest by saying that, the least you can do is get out your chequebook and donate some cash because the hydro bill's going to be going up.

I'd happily settle for any PCCs, Long Branch or elsewhere. That picture pretty much nails what a winter streetcar ride to the end of the line is in my mind. Orion 7? No, not really all that interested in those.