I just came back from Boston and ended up riding each line that the MBTA provides in the Boston area except for commuter rail and some heritage railway I didn’t need to use. Because of how weird the entire network is itself, I have a thought on each line in a sort of roasting-like manner.

The whole network is weird to me because no single line runs the same type of vehicle as another. This is a bit baffling coming from a city where there are three lines and two of them use the same train types. That and the headways between trains just makes it so awkward.

At least this visit to Boston unlike the last one had all of the lines as functioning although on the weekend one line was running with a shuttle bus between two stations.

Red Line

Braintree and Alewife are termini? These names are just wild. This is probably the most normal of the lines I rode

Blue Line

Wonderland is the name of a terminus? I have never been in a subway where not only do the platforms curve upward but also to a side. That is some impressive engineering.

Orange Line

Nice to know that trains can catch fire and not manage to kill anyone. Why does this line run so slowly again?

Green Line

Good lord. This line is weird. Level-crossings for pedestrians isn’t so weird, but it is extremely weird when they’re inside of the subway itself. Also, is this a subway or a tram? The use of low-floor trains kind of remind of Brussels’ tram network, but these cars are nowhere near as elegant.

The theme of Expo 86 was transportation and many, many countries took advantage of the show to demonstrate their developments in this field. Of course, the star of the show was Canada’s SkyTrain, but Japan showed its maglev train, America its cars, and the United Kingdom showed its conventional rail.

British Rail, the then government corporation behind operation and development of rail transportation in the United Kingdom decided to send one of its Class 142 train sets (aka “Pacer”) diesel trains (dubbed as “railbus”) to tour Metro Vancouver.

They regularly ran service from a temporary station in Abbotsford to New Westminster during the summer months of 1986 along the railway once referred to as the Fraser Valley Line during the BC Electric Railway days.

It did make an appearance near the Expo grounds at Pacific Central and was given a largely lukewarm reception by locals and government officials. The common critique of the train was the one shared by those back in the UK: it was an uncomfortable ride.

The reasons behind the uncomfortable ride are known: unlike most trains, this was based on a bus made by British Leyland. A rail chassis was fixed to the bus body and then some slight modifications were made to the cab to make it “rail-ready”. Unlike a typical train, the wheels were fixed in place which made them noisy. To add to this, there were only two axels per car unlike the typical four you’d see on other trains including all of the ones used by SkyTrain today, which resulted in a rougher ride.

After the summer, the train set was sent back to the UK where it operated on various different services until all Pacers were retired at the end of 2020.

This is a reproduction of a post made on cohost.org where my friend, Tam and I went on to travel on the entirety of Metro Vancouver’s SkyTrain network

Today, my friend, witchpixels and I are going to travel the entire length of the three-line, 79.6 KM rapid transit system known as SkyTrain! This will have us riding eight trains through 53 stations across seven municipalities in Metro Vancouver!

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and with the construction of the Broadway extension and the upcoming Surrey/Langley extension, this is our opportunity to ride the system using what we believe is the shortest path!

12:27 PM - VCC Clark

It begins! 12:27 pm we have left VCC Clark!

12:48 PM - Lougheed Town Centre

12:48 PM and we are at Lougheed Town Centre!

1:04 PM - Lafarge Lake-Douglas

1:04 PM and we completed the Millennium line! Now to go back! We lucked out as our train didn’t require us to deboard!

1:23 PM - Lougheed Town Centre

1:23 PM and we made it to Lougheed! Unfortunately we will be waiting for our transfer train to get us to Columbia.

1:37 PM - Columbia

1:37 PM and we managed to make a quick transfer at Columbia! Onward into Surrey!

1:45 PM - King George

1:45 PM and we made it on to the long leg all the way to Waterfront!

2:21 PM - Passing VCC-Clark

2:21 PM and we are just passing where we started!

2:31 PM - Waterfront

2:31 PM and we made it to Waterfront! We are going to Richmond-Brighouse first! We had to pass through the station hall but somehow boarded our waiting train effortlessly!

So far we have lucked out on transfers with the worst being five minutes!

2:58 PM - Richmond-Brighouse

2:58 PM and we are at Richmond-Brighouse! One more transfer left and we will be at the end!

3:07 PM - Bridgeport

3:07 PM and we are about to do the last leg. The train we need is immediately next!

3:20 PM - YVR Airport

And time! 2 hours 49 minutes and 8 seconds to ride the entire SkyTrain system! I guess in 2025 or 2026 we can do this again with the Millennium Line extension to Arbutus.

Post-journey statistics

If anyone wants to know the splits, they’re as follows:

• VCC Clark to Lafarge Lake/Douglas - 36m 36s
• Lafarge Lake/Douglas to Lougheed Town Centre - 17m 28s *
• Lougheed Town Centre to Columbia - 13m 50s
• Columbia to King George - 10m 20s
• King George to Waterfront - 43m 45s
• Waterfront to Richmond-Brighouse - 29m 58s
• Richmond-Brighouse to Bridgeport - 7m 55s *
• Bridgeport to YVR-Airport - 9m 8s

*Denotes that we never had to transfer trains to continue our journey!

Update (August 30, 2023)

Holy shit. We beat the Guinness record for this speedrun.

The SkyTrain speedrun was beaten on this trip!

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Map showing the Port Kells area of Surrey (Google)

In a few years, you’ll be able to ride SkyTrain all the way into Langley, passing by one of Cloverdale’s quiet landmarks: the Honeybee Centre. However, if you go just the building, you’ll notice a road that runs on an angle, which is odd considering most of Surrey’s roads tend to run in cardinal directions save for Fraser Highway and a few others.

Harvie Rd. is a shortcut from Port Kells to the rest of Surrey, but its origins as a road do not come from being a shortcut but instead a railway. There are a few roads that do not conform to the grid system and they too share this history as well.

Approximate path that the railway took

In 1891, the New Westminster-Southern Railway opened a passenger railway crossing across the US border into Cloverdale and then to New Westminster via Port Kells. This route followed what is now Highway 15 with a deviation around a hill in Hazlemere.

For some time, it was the only rail service connecting the United States and Canada west of the Rockies. Its construction was of major concern to the federal government due to possible threat to sovereignty by the Americans.

Southern portion of the railway about 3 KM north of the United States border

In 1907, the Great Northern Railway, the parent company to the NWSR, opted to reroute all rail service to its line which straddled the Semiahmoo peninsula and subsequently ended its inland rail connection going through Blaine. The NWSR struggled to remain competitive in the face of the BC Electric Railway providing similar service, which intersected in Cloverdale.

By 1929, the railway was declared abandoned and as time has gone on much of the right of way has been usurped by the highway it once ran alongside. However, remnants of it are still visible if you know where to look.

Harvey Rd. as seen from near the Port Kells Library

As for road itself, it got its name from NWSR’s first engineer, Robert Harvie. It has since received heritage right of way status from the City of Surrey, which protects it as a roadway.

If you’re interested in additional information, this blog article from 2014 is also worth a read! I used the custom Google Maps link they created to generate the above maps.

This is also a post archived from cohost.org/VancouverTransit.

Last week, a friend of mine, who was not much older than I passed away in his sleep from a heart attack. I had been friends with him since I was a teenager so the sudden passing of him came as a complete shock to me.

I have been wanting to write things about him on here, but I cannot bring myself to do so and I think it’s because there’s something looming over me. I feel awful about making this open because I do not want his death to be about me. But maybe I should say what is on my mind? The timing feels bad, but I also feel the need to let this come out.

For almost two years, I have resided in my apartment alone with my cat. I love my cat, but she is a terrible conversationalist and my extroverted self really thrives on having other human beings around. I don’t lament the reasons for how I ended up living alone, but I think the pandemic and the consequences it has had on my socialisation have manifested in my inability to meet people who could be a potential “nesting partner” so to speak.

I’ve never really lived alone for extended periods of time and when I last did live alone, I at least was able to have friends over or I was not home enough to worry about the lack of another body sharing that space with me. What is different now is that I don’t go into my office that often (twice a week really) and there are days where the lone human interaction I get other than from the rectangles that I stare at all the time are just the nameless people I share my apartment building with.

In my life of not sharing a home with my family, I have spent seven of twelve years with someone else. Three of the five where I haven’t, I always had friends or family coming over, partners who’d spend time at my home or at theirs, or I’d be in the office every day and there would be ample opportunity to see folks after work. The pandemic really put a kink into these options and it has been incredibly painful for me to deal with.

I’m not single. I am dating a wonderful girlfriend locally and have a not-so-serious relationship afar, but none of them are potential nesting partners. The death of Twitter, the shift from my being “very online” to basically not, and lack of travel aren’t really the sources of my problems, but it’s the lack of meeting new folks and being able to socialise without the anxiety of finding myself as ill has taken away my ability to meet new people.

My most serious relationships came from socialising locally and while that is of course not a requirement for me to end up dating towards that partner desire, I cannot argue with its purported success rate–even after splitting, I am still good with two of the past three nesting partners I have had.

Why I am so fixated on the lack of said partner comes back to my friend’s death. What if I were the one to have had that heart attack? Nobody would know for days.

Dying alone scares the hell out of me. It is not something I make that open, but if anyone ever asks me for my number one fear, it’s literally that.

I feel devastated for his wife I should add. This was far too early and they had only been married for just under seven years. He meant so much to her and to have him just die at middle-age without any real warning is something I cannot comprehend. They should have been able to go into retirement together.

I’m seriously going to miss this friend of mine. He had been around for a lot of things in my life and the same for his. And now, I am saying goodbye to him. So many people left messages on his Facebook wall and so much support has been given to his widow. He had people who cared about him deeply.

So while I feel selfish for posting about this on the eve of my friend’s funeral, I just cannot shake these feelings off and just want to vent this out to the world. It isn’t a pity plea or anything, but I sometimes feel that I should make others aware that the cool stuff I share on cohost is often missing the realities of my personal life.

I also know many, many people care about me and many of you are probably reading this.

One of the things I decided last year was to give more to myself rather than to others. I realised this hard during an event last summer that I really don’t do nice things for me. It’s hard because I want everyone around me to be happy, but I think it has come at the consequence of my happiness being pushed aside.

So I quit being a lead and started to socialise a lot more. However, unlike four years ago, the world has an invisible threat that prevents me from being as “care-free” so to speak in terms of seeing everyone I know and love. I know that with time I’ll met this special person, but it’s not going to be as easy as I would prefer.

Not everyone new I meet is going to be intended to be that sort of relationship either I must add. I am also demisexual and demiromantic so it’s a quagmire for me to grasp what I am feeling when it comes to other people. It’s all shades of grey when it comes to romantic feelings and it often sucks.

Anyway, sorry for the real talk and I hope nobody thinks less of me for venting this out into the open. I guess I just want people to know a side of me that I keep under wraps.