For those who use New Westminster Station on the regular, it’s a place you either pass through, you get off to see a movie, or you catch a bus from to go up the steep hills of the city is named for. However, it has a long history of being a terminus going back to the early 20th Century.

The original station building was located adjacent to the present-day station and is now a thrift store and office. It was opened in 1891 and sat directly next to the Canadian Pacific Railway’s station.

It was a terminus for the Burnaby Lake and Central Park BC Electric Railway (BCER) interurban lines plus provided through service for the Vancouver to Chilliwack service as well. Add on top the street cars that littered New Westminster and a connection to Richmond (Lulu Island) and also to Vancouver via the Marpole line, you find yourself with a major hub for railway services in the region.

With the dissolution of passenger service provided by the BCER, New Westminster being a transportation hub in what was then Greater Vancouver came to an end. It became an area dominated by the car especially after the City of New Westminster opted to build a giant parkade on its waterfront in order to “revitalise” the area.

In 1985, New Westminster returned to being a transportation focal point with the opening of SkyTrain service and once again it became a terminus station. To facilitate it being a terminus station, half of the tracks were covered over with a temporary platform. This was because there was a planned extension to another station in the downtown area and then off to Surrey.

This station became important to New Westminster’s efforts to revitalise its downtown core and in the 2000s, it became a focal point for densification. The former grounds of a car dealership, a parking lot, and a retail complex were all to be used as part of turning the station into a hub for residences and shopping.

Today, New Westminster station is not only a hub for connections elsewhere in the city and beyond, but you can go there to get your groceries, eat a meal, and watch a movie. It even acts as an intermodal as a brief walk can take you to a ferry which connects downtown New Westminster with Queensborough.

Perhaps in the future it will be a connection to Vancouver via the old Marpole line?

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Princess Diana walking along the platform of Patterson Station in 1986 (City of Vancouver Archives)

Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and Princess Diana greeting two people (Vancouver Province)

In 1986, during Expo ’86, King Charles III (then Prince) and his then wife, Princess Diana paid a visit to Patterson Station in Burnaby to see the new rapid transit system. They boarded car 014, dubbed the “Spirit of Canada”, and made history as the first visiting monarch to use the transit system.

However, this visit overshadows another royal visit and one that had substantial ramifications for the country the monarch heralded from.

Plaque as seen on train 014

On May 8th, 1989, Thailand’s Princess Chulabhorn paid a visit to Vancouver and rode on the very same car the Prince and Princess of Wales rode three years prior. Ten years later, Thailand’s capital city, Bangkok would open its BTS Skytrain.

BTS Skytrain vehicles passing each other (author unknown)

However, unlike the Vancouver SkyTrain (note the upper case ‘T’ in our name), Bangkok’s system did not use trains from Bombardier and instead its initial set were from Siemens. The reason for the name was that the original system proposal was the Lavalin Skytrain, as SNC Lavalin itself was responsible for the construction of Vancouver’s system. This project was cancelled in 1992 officially due to financial reasons, but it was suggested politics played a role in its demise.

For whatever reason, despite SNC Lavalin’s lack of involvement in the succeeding project, the name “Skytrain” stuck and in 1999, the Bangkok Mass Transit System officially opened and named as “BTS Skytrain”. Perhaps the Princess just liked the name? Who knows.

This was originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.

Years ago, I wrote in-depth about Twitch being a complete trash fire. As a response to it, I made a bot which I shared with about 40 different streamers that addressed Twitch’s shortcomings.

For about a year and a half, this bot ran largely uninterrupted and had all sorts of features such as predictive bans, exemptions, algorithmic bans, and so forth. It was far more advanced than whatever Twitch had out there and I believe it probably prevented a few hate raids against marginalised streamers.

In February, Twitch removed the ability to perform bans via its chat interface and instead shifted everything to requiring a user access token in conjunction with its HTTP API.

On the surface, this is fine in the grand scheme of things, but it required me to completely rejig the entire authentication model from just simply using a /mod command on the bot and then me joining the channel to asking for everyone to sign in and pass me a token. This is a piss-poor design because it would be just easier to assign the permissions via legacy means, but nope, you have to re-authenticate that bot.

I might be overthinking or misunderstanding this, but the bot also has become more onerous to update and is also costing me CA$40/month of which I largely pay out of pocket–not complaining, but it is a personal expense that would have not occurred if Twitch had made good tools years ago. Combine with increasing living expenses, I have decided that it’s not fun to pay for this anymore.

In any event, because of the cost and Twitch finally has tooling that makes it easier to deal with bullshit after much, much yelling in their direction from all sorts of groups, I feel it is time to officially state that I have sunsetted the bot. I hope that it did benefit those who needed it most and I am always willing to provide a hand should anything come up in the future. ❤️

In case you’re wondering: all data is being deleted from the database and backups are going with!

It turns out that in the Ultimate Talkie Edition of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, touching the model lighthouse in Phatt Island but not retrieving its lens creates a softlock condition. When returning to Scabb Island, Dredd leaves to go “do errands” and consequently makes you stuck without the ability to get the map reassembled. The cartographer in Scabb needs that lens but you have no boat to go back!

This bug does not exist in the non-Talkie versions as far as I can tell. I did some searching in various places and it appears that I am not the first person to run across it.

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Approximate location of the former station, Connaught Hill (Google Street View)

When riding down the Expo Line from Edmonds to 22nd Street, one may notice that it is a rather lengthy ride. At nearly 2 KM, it’s nowhere near the longest distance between stations, but when it was the interurban Central Park Line, there was a station in-between the two.

The BC Electric Railway (BCER) had a station around what is now 9th Avenue in Burnaby or simply situated south of a SkyTrain maintenance facility. Connaught Hill, named after after the western province of Ireland named Connaught, was a small station serving the now-residential area straddling the Burnaby and New Westminster border.

Station location in New Westminster (Google)

Back then, it was a large gravel pit. The hole created conveniently ended up becoming the SkyTrain maintenance facility we have today.

Connaught Hill as it appeared in the 1950s (TransLink / BC Transit)

Today, there sits no station but you can visit its old location when travelling along the BC Parkway.

Stopped to take a photo as I cycled on by. You can see the remnants of the old tracks left behind.