A ROUGH Calculation of the Requirement to Run the Expo Line During Peak Hours

[00:00:00]I was looking at some trains on the Expo Line, but some of you may be wondering how many trains are used during peak hours. Well, with a bit of napkin math, we can [music] probably get this down to within one or two trains. For the definition of trains, we use 85-m equivalents: five-car Mark V's, [music] six-car Mark I's, and four cars and everything else. And now we just need to know how long one lap [music] takes to go to the same platform. That is, to go from one end of the line and back to the exact [music] same place you started.

[00:00:24]So, at the same station, but the same platform. Thankfully, on both branches, it's about 85 minutes as we assume no long-term maintenance like closures from Braid [music] to Lougheed. For the King George branch, there's a train every 3 minutes on paper. So, we take the round trip time and divide that by the frequency, and we get 29 [music] trains, rounded up to the next whole train. And on the Production branch, it's every 6 minutes on paper. So, taking that, we have a requirement of 15 trains.

[00:00:48]Combining the two, we get around 44 [music] trains needed to operate the Expo Line. And that's with 120 seconds of headway from Waterfront to Columbia.

[00:00:54][music] And in a perfect world, it's theoretically possible to run peak service with just one Mark I train.