63 Ossington

Supposedly Metrolinx goofed on the Bathurst St closure plan and announced it without even securing a permit from the city - so at least for now, it won't be going forward. According to Josh Matlow, there will be some community consultations in January about how it will be moving forward.

There has been the noise issue on the BD, and leaves on track (though they should all be gone already), but also what seems like an unusually high number of track defects requiring emergency repairs during service hours (though these have not been exclusive to open cuts). On a separate note, the switching from wayside to ATC at Dupont is highly variable in terms of smoothness - sometimes it seems like a normal stop with no extra time needed, but sometimes we're dwelling for over 30 seconds after the platform is sufficiently serviced. However I wonder if that is due to ATC holding the train for service spacing, or if there are difficulties with hooking up the train to ATC. I'm wondering if that's the case, due to the fact that the SB direction is much smoother transitioning to wayside/manual mode than NB into ATC. But if ATC does auto-regulate service regularity, it doesn't explain why there are still ridiculous gaps during the morning peak hours...

Uhm, how about the 7/307 detour eh? No exact start date either, and a quick scour in the usual spots on the TTC website didn't yield any notice about it. http://www.thecrosstown.ca/news-media/whats-new/notice-of-closure-of-bathurst-street-december-2018-june-2019?fbclid=IwAR27HRcyOeTJf-8-8HMX4bHYYZ19PoOkaXhM_7oiwI7EpVW38HtEzpcH0ZI

At this stage while there's still time before construction can actually start, is getting the funding and planning set up. So once ATC is complete, construction can start. Not that there is any political will right now though... Suicide prevention is just one of the benefits, others (platform safety in general, garbage containment, preventing unauthorizeds, etc) are just as significant.

They were reporting massive delays on the 63 near Eglinton West due to heavy traffic earlier this evening. Maybe related?

The new overhead catenary at St Clair West is a contact-bar system and is not compatible with trolley shoes.

Supposedly Presto is working on a phone app which theoretically should show your tap history. But not everyone has a smartphone or data so....

Speaking of overhead issues this afternoon there was a "plastic caught in overhead" disruption that suspended 512 service between St Clair and St Clair W Stn. What would that be from? And blocked track problem (then power failure) on Spadina at Sussex (might it be car in tunnel hehe?) detouring 510's to Bathurst Stn earlier as well.

8308 (on 90 Vaughan) somehow got stuck at the top of the WB portal at St. Clair West... plugged all the routes heading out west for a while. Eventually the 512's waiting to exit all turned back EB and the buses circled and used the secondary bus ramp to exit the station. Cleared in about 15 mins.

Radio = surface channel 1, he probably was listening on a scanner.

Not quite sure where you pulled the highway thing from.... I meant that due to its location, an incident, such as your building fire example, could happen far away such as in Scarborough. For the bus to get staffed by a Special Constable, and then driven to the scene in Scarborough from Queensway, it could be prohibitively long.

Supposedly they are to be driven by Special Constables for pre-planned events only. Also being based at Queensway still (I believe), it can take quite a while to get to the scene.

No shuttles. EDIT: Thursday Nov 8th (the last day), the website posting changed to slyly mention that shuttles will be provided.

SB at Glencairn around 7:45 ish this evening, a 6-pack T1 set, NIS. Lead car 5136-5137-5123-5122, and didn't catch the last two car numbers.

One policy I'd prefer being followed is not closing the doors on customers still boarding. Aka opening all the doors and in 3 seconds close them via the operator controls so the customer-operated buttons don't work. A certain subset of the population will jam the doors which can lead to its own problems, but another subset of the population will not (like customers should), and be unjustly left behind. For the 512 cars running back to the yard, a lot of ops will throw up a 511 to Queen sign or 501 to Leslie sign so it doesn't resemble a 512 sign (esp at the Bathurst stop).