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After SkyTrain was extended to Scott Road in 1991 and plans were put in place to extend it to the Expo Line’s current terminus, King George, there was a lot of talk by BC Transit and the then ruling Social Credit (Socred) government of the time on where to take Metro Vancouver’s transit network next. With more service means more trains and BC Transit made it a point to investigate its options.

Test Vehicle 06 or “TV06” was brought over from Urban Transportation Development Corporation’s facility in Kingston, Ontario. UTDC were the creators of the original SkyTrain technology and vehicles, so it was a natural fit for them to be involved with the creation of a successor vehicle.

UTDC’s approach was simple: take an existing Mark I vehicle and extend it. What was interesting about their approach was that the vehicle they chose was used on the SkyTrain demonstration line in 1983.

The vehicles used for the demonstration were the property of UTDC and had been used for testing and sales purposes after they returned home. UTDC decided that one of the vehicles would be better served as a test platform for a longer version of the vehicle with an additional door.

BC Transit continued to investigate options for the future of SkyTrain including hiring a film production crew to build a mockup train. This train was made of wood and while I cannot confirm, I have read that it was put on display at the 1991 Pacific National Exhibition (PNE).

These trains may look familiar despite never having made any revenue service appearance, as this version of the Mark II was eventually used for Kuala Lumpur’s metro system. They were sold as cheaper than existing SkyTrain vehicles, could hold twice as many people per car, and were of course still compatible with the existing system.

However, plans were about to briefly change with an upcoming election. The sitting Socred government lost handily to the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 1991 fall election. This new government had long been skeptical of SkyTrain and wanted to implement light rail (LRT) as opposed to advanced light rail (ALRT).

The story around the Millennium Line potentially becoming LRT too deserves its own article, but suffice to say, after a few years, this idea was abandoned sometime after Premier Mike Harcourt resigned and Glen Clark took his place.

He favoured going back to SkyTrain and in 1998, his government had BC Transit partner with Bombardier, UTDC’s successor to not only use ALRT technology for the new line, but to also build the trains right next to SkyTrain’s maintenance facility in Burnaby.

A “dummy” train was made and tested on the Expo Line during the planning stages for the new vehicles. It had no powertrain and thus had to be pushed around, but it was used to provide data to BC Transit and Bombardier for the development of a new train.

In 2000, the Mark II test vehicle started to venture on the now Expo Line. For the most part, tests were flawless and minus a few tweaks to the line itself such as changes to switches or placement of track indicators, they eventually entered revenue service in 2001 just in time for 2002’s opening of the Millennium Line.

The Mark IIs and Mark Is were a common sight on both lines. However, the Mark IIs were more popular as they had features such as air conditioning and were considerably quieter in operation. Exiting a Mark II train during the morning or afternoon rush was also much easier thanks to having three doors and more space when standing.

While the Mark I is still a common sight on the Expo Line, they are approaching nearly four decades in use for the original train sets and despite a refurbishment programme starting in 2013, they are due to be retired.

Later this year, Mark V trains will be delivered from Alstom, who has since acquired Bombardier. A total of 41 new train sets have been ordered to replace the aging Mark I fleet and to allow for the extension of the Millennium Line to Arbutus to meet expected capacity needs. By 2026, these new trains will completely replace the Mark Is.

I personally hope someone acquires one of the Mark I pairs and opens a coffee shop inside of one called the “Expresso Line”. If you like that idea and want to run with it, it’s free.

Portions of this article were sourced from this Buzzer piece written back in April 2019. This was also originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.

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Shopping centre with a disused railway going through

Map showing its old path

If you find yourself wandering in and around Chinatown and Gastown, you might notice an alleyway that there is an alleyway that goes on an angle from the port to International Village shopping centre, with its entrance continuing this path towards about where Stadium-Chinatown station stands today.

This is what is left of a railway that connected the Canadian National Railway’s (CNR) yard in what is today Yaletown plus other railway services to the Canadian Pacific (CPR) yard near the Port of Vancouver.

Prior to 1932, the CPR’s only option to reach Burrard Inlet was a pathway that crossed through a cut in Vancouver’s busy city centre. The railway intersected with the busy streets of Pender and Hastings and passed the BC Electric Railway’s downtown terminus at Carrall.

This unsurprising produced a great deal of congestion for the city and railway. The railway needed to get mail, freight, and passengers around quickly and the city wanted fewer accidents. At a cost of CA$1.6 million (or about CA$33 million in 2023), a tunnel was built under Dunsmuir street to then s-curve to an exit at about Burrard Street.

CPR trains could now quickly loop around to their station at what is now Waterfront and no longer have to find themselves at odds with other railway traffic or people.

This tunnel would keep its importance until passenger and freight services to the area ceased in 1982. It would then eventually become the underground portion of the Expo Line we have on the SkyTrain system today.

As for the former surface railway, it had become disused and over time development in the area turned it into a parking lot, a beautified alley, and the main hall of a shopping centre. It seems that both the tunnel and the cut it replaced have survived in their own ways.

This was originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.

A comment came up in my direction this past week that I felt like I need to refute: “you need to stream on Twitch to do well at speedrunning”. This response was troubling as it came from someone that the speedrunning community needs more of: women.

Women and non-men are less common participants in the speedrunning world. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a reason is that streaming can be daunting. This may be due to concerns about safety, the cost of streaming itself, or just having little to no desire to have a public face when engaging in the hobby. However, this should not be a limiting factor and there are a lot of options to get in on speedrunning and I want to write about them here.

Firstly, you can speedrun a video game even if you have a loose interest in it. Getting a world record should never be your goal. I enjoy speedrunning Super Mario World when I can and I am only somewhere in the 700-800th place range in the category I like to run. My goal is to beat my last best time and keep getting better than what I did before. Everyone else is just people I am passing on my own journey.

This attitude I feel is healthy and important. Nobody should have solely “compete” with other speedrunners, but instead just best themselves. It’s no different than picking up an exercise routine and besting your 10 KM runs.

Secondly, streaming gear is expensive but you don’t have to go all out on recording your runs. If you’re streaming a game that is emulated or running on your personal computer, you don’t have to do much other than record your game locally using just OBS. And yeah. You only have to record your speedrun if you want to track it on a website like [Speedrun.com](https://web.archive.org/web/20250102001603mp_/https://www.speedrun.com–most if not all of the leaderboards require you to record the run in its entirety. If you just want to use a tool like LiveSplit to just time it and never record it, then so be it!

If you’re dealing with a console that you wish to record, you have the option to just use your laptop’s webcam or your cell phone! Pointing a camera at a screen and playing the game the most kick butt way you know how is perfectly valid. Should you wish to make a better recording than whatever your camera outputs, capture options are out there that won’t break US$50. It doesn’t need to be expensive or high-quality to make it useful.

I have one argument against streaming speedrunning: it’s distracting to interact with anyone watching you. When you stream on Twitch, you are for a lack of a better way of describing it an entertainer–that is what the Canada Revenue Agency claims I am at least. Speedrunning offline is perfectly fine and I want to encourage you to do it even if you want to keep it low-key!

Speedrunning is for all.

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.