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BC Electric train at New Westminster Station during the Duke of Connaught visit (City of New Westminster)

New Westminster Station today

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.

Interurban as seen from the entrance of New Westminster Station (City of Vancouver Archives)

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.

New Westminster Station’s current location as seen in the early 1980s (City of New Westminster)

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.

New Westminster Station as seen in 1986 (City of Vancouver Archives)

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.

New Westminster Station as seen in the 1990s

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.

New Westminster Station is now part of a shopping centre

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?

This was originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.

Exterior of the inhaler

Partially taken apart

Interior mechanicals

Metalic strip removed

I found myself rather dismayed at how much plastic is required to make this medical device work for me each morning. To alleviate this, I wanted to know how it worked and maybe see if I can recycle any or part of it so over the weekend I took it apart.

The device has two rollers as it permits two different doses. As you take the blue handle down towards the right, it strips a specific portion of the metallic strip that was once housed and places powder into the chamber. I then inhale from the chamber mouthpiece and it enters my lungs, allowing me to get through my day without having an attack. This also moves a dial (which started at 30) to then report how many doses are left.

Fairly basic and I can see why it is constructed like this.

For the record, this medicine is far better than my previous one. I have not had to touch my secondary inhaler in almost a month.

Hello from Whistler.

One of the most important aspects of a railway is the standardization of the railway itself. Trains have to fit the platforms they pick up passengers from and they must also be able to successfully roll along the rails it sits atop of. This is called gauge and we have two different sets of the measurement to work with.

A weird question came to mind: could an Expo or Millennium Line train fit on the Canada Line? How about vice-versa? Let’s talk about this.

Firstly, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way. There is no way for any Expo or Millennium Line train to independently function on the Canada Line. The propulsion technology used on the two lines requires the centre rail in order to propel itself along the rails. However, the rails themselves would permit the trains to fit and roll along.

All three of the lines use the same rail gauge. Rail gauge simply dictates the distance between the two rails and in the case of the SkyTrain system, it’s 1,435 mm or 4 feet and 8.5 inches–everybody calls this “standard gauge”. This gauge is used all over the world and is the same for railways operated by CN and CPKC, the entirety of the National Rail system in the United Kingdom, and virtually every railway in mainland Europe save for non-high speed railways in Spain, Finland, and some railways of former Soviet bloc countries.

If someone were able to bring a Mark I rolling stock on to the Canada Line, they would be able to pull the cars along the rails with very little resistance. However, one glaring problem would appear: the trains are smaller. This is where the second gauge comes into play: load.

The Mark I trains are smaller than their Hyundai Rotem cousins. How much smaller? About almost a half-metre smaller at its width (a Mark II is 2.5m wide and a Rotem is 3) and the platform height on the Canada Line is 25 cm taller (100 cm vs 75 cm). Some Mark II and III trains have run into problems where they’re 2-3 cm too tall which is a huge problem for accessibility, but a full quarter metre difference would be egregious.

So this leads us into the obvious problem with the inverse: the Canada Line trains would fit on the rails but that would be about it. They’d all quite violently clip the platforms if they could power themselves.

And then this finally leads us to this: the power is completely different between the two systems too. The voltage is 700 VDC (volts direct current) on the Canada Line and 625 VDC for the other two. Multi-voltage trains are very common, but it won’t matter here anyway since the way power is handled by the trains is radically different.

On the Expo and Millennium Lines, power is fed by two rails mounted on the side. One rail is to supply power and the other is to return power. This is all to provide a circuit so the trains can operate.

The Canada Line is different: there is a third rail but it is mounted downwards as opposed to the side and it’s just a single rail with return power provided through the rails itself. I have had a railway engineer complain to me about this design, but I barely understood the actual problem with it other than it makes maintenance a bit of a pain.

That is how radically different the systems are from each other.

Via the CBC:

PepperBrooks was getting ready to wash her dishes when she noticed something didn’t add up.

The new bottle of Dawn Platinum she’d bought contained 431 millilitres of dish soap, 10 per cent less than an older bottle of the same product that she had in her cupboard.

Despite the difference, both bottles had cost the same.

“I’m not happy about it,” said the Mississauga, Ont., marketing strategist who goes by the mononym PepperBrooks. “There was no notification. They didn’t let me know as a consumer that I’m going to be getting less for the same [price].”

[…]

But PepperBrooks believes regulations aren’t the best approach. Instead, she feels the onus should be on manufacturers to fess up when they shrink a product — or risk losing customers.

“It’s more on the company, as like a social responsibility, to let them, the consumer, know that they are getting less,” she said. “I think it builds brand loyalty.”

After her experience with Dawn dish soap, PepperBrooks said she’s still using the product but now feels less loyal to the brand and is keeping her eye out for alternatives.

Ah yes. The thing that’ll keep companies in line is not regulation but instead “social responsibility”.

I looked the woman up so naturally she’d have this mindset.

I’m sure that she’d have been against food regulation when they were being introduced in the 1920s. Social responsibility would have been enough to prevent us from eating sawdust.