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.

Aside from his cryptic racism towards the Japanese, one of the things that stood out in Great Ace Attorney’s prosecutor, Barok van Zieks was his consumption of an alcoholic beverage in the courtroom. This is a departure from the norm in Ace Attorney games as the joke in Japanifornia is that everyone consumes grape or tomato juice, but since we’re in Victorian England, temperance was forgotten and we got this world instead.

So was the beverage he consumed? Let’s check the the Ace Attorney fandom wiki for an answer:

Prominent among his bizarre bench behavior was his habit of bringing wine, though he only rarely actually drank from the chalices that he poured into. Instead, he smashed them wantonly to intimidate the defense and emphasize his points. When the court proceedings required van Zieks to change tacks, he would fling his bottle into the gallery behind him with little regard to whom it might hit. Over three cases that he prosecuted against Naruhodo, at least three bottles and nineteen glasses were broken. Despite all this, the prosecution’s bench and van Zieks’s clothes would remain immaculate.

The thing is: based on how the bottles would break upon hitting the oil lanterns, it would be impossible for it to be wine as the flames emitted indicated that it was something with a higher alcohol content. Simply put: wine cannot be set ablaze.

Throughout Adventures and its sequel, Resolve, I annoyingly kept watching him toss a bottle of his “precious vintages” behind him towards a lit flame and upon collision seeing it catch fire. Red wine would match the colour of the contents of his “hallowed chalice” which would put it as low as 12.5% ABV (alcohol by volume) to as high as 14.5%, although it is said it could peak at 20%. Even in Victorian England, this would not be much different.

For an alcoholic beverage to catch fire, it needs to be at least 40% ABV, but in personal experience, it should be around 60% for it to do anything substantiative. As this article puts it:

Don’t bother trying to light a floater of any alcohol under 40 percent alcohol by volume. You can get a little action in the 30-percent range, but it’s not worth the trouble.

One little tangent here: an aluminum can with a volume of 355 mL filled to the top with 5% ABV beer would contain 18 mL of alcohol. What makes this cool is that a typical can weighs about 14g, so if you take that 18 mL and convert it to grams, it comes out to 14g as well.

Anyway, since wine cannot be set ablaze, what could it be? Could we just increase the alcohol content of wine to something like 40%? Well, yes, we can. Let’s talk about brandy.

Brandy is distilled wine, but unlike its origins, it contains anywhere between 35 and 60% ABV. It was popular in Victorian England and like wine, was stored in casks, which van Zieks had plenty of. Being that it was 40% it could catch on fire.

However, what makes this disturbing is how he consumed it. It is hard to discern, but his goblet probably held about 125 mL if we just opt to use this as a reference. At 125 mL, that would be about 3-4 shots of brandy, which is quite a bit. Controversy about this measurement aside, but being that the CDC states 1-2 drinks per day is safe, he is exceeding what is recommended as a single shot is that one drink.

Basically, this implies that van Zieks is super unhealthy and is probably a functional alcoholic. Considering his backstory and the era it takes place in, it sort of tracks. Great Ace Attorney does take place a century after the gin craze, a time period where the consumption of gin by the pint was not unheard of, so maybe it would also track that this man would consume his brandy in such a manner.

In any event, last night, I tried congac for the first time and I can safely say that I don’t think I could consume it the way he does even if I really wanted to.

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Commercial Drive and Broadway circa 1940s with a street car 5 going downtown and an interurban going to New Westminster (City of Vancouver Archives)

The intersection of Commercial Drive and Broadway is today a major interchange station between SkyTrain’s Millennium and Expo lines, and the rapid bus 99 B-Line. Historically, this area has been of major importance the two BC Electric Railway’s interurban lines which served east Vancouver (the Central Park and Burnaby Lake lines) merged with the street car serving Commercial Drive to then feed into downtown.

However, this produced a major choke point as having three different rail services interlining on a single street created serious congestion challenges for the BCER. A solution proposed in the 1920s was a proposal to extend the Central Park line from Victoria and Hull all the way to Main Street.

Map showing railways around East Vancouver (City of Vancouver Archives)

Walking along Commercial as it bends to become Victoria

This would have extended the line northwest along the curve where Victoria turns into Commercial, then crossing Clark and Broadway, with a tunnel under St. Catherine’s Street, then following along E. 2nd Avenue until finally turning to cross False Creek, then finally terminating at the Great Northern Station located at Carrall and Keefer.

A very failed attempt at overlaying the old map and the current state, looking at Commercial and Broadway

Same process but looking at the rail yards in and around Pacific Central and Terminal Ave

Overlaying the map from the 1930s on something modern takes a lot of guesswork as you can tell, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what the Expo Line could have been.

Lakeview station which was then a community garden but has since become housing

With the onset of the Second World War and decade-later closure of the Central Park line, these plans were never meant to be. The modern Expo Line now turns away from what was then Cedar Cottage (now a community garden) and crosses over Broadway and Commercial to follow the Grandview cut towards downtown.

That said, with the extension of the Millennium Line to Arbutus, a tunnel is now going to grace the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant after all.

This was an article originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit but moved here due to the site’s shutdown.