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.

A few months ago, I had a weird thought cross my mind: how many stations on the SkyTrain network are shared with other railways in the world?

I had two rules in mind for figuring this out: the stations must be active as in not under construction or closed (although I bent the rule on one station for good reason) and it must be named as “X station”.

This meant that “Production Way-University” would not mean I would look for stations named “Production Way” or “University” (the latter would definitely have many hits). It also meant that Lansdowne Station would have to have a name pair matching that name and not say “Lansdowne Road Station” or the like.

With these rules in mind, I did some cursory searches on Wikipedia to see what I could find. I am certain that I missed a few as I went along and it might be worth talking about any connections between the two places should something interesting come up in the future.

Aberdeen

You can find pairs for this station in the following:

• Aberdeen, Maryland
• Aberdeen, Scotland
• New South Wales, Australia

The one in Scotland should be no surprise really.

Bridgeport

This is also an Amtrak and Metro North railway station serving Bridgeport, Connecticut. It’s also a station I’ve passed through.

Edmonds

This station probably has the second closest name pair as it’s located in Seattle. You can with work get from either of the pair to each other with just a single transfer.

It’s also another station I’ve passed through.

Gateway

St. Louis in Missouri, Portland in Oregon, and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania each have their own Gateway station.

Gilmore

Shared with Line 2 on the Manila Light Rail Transit (LRT) in the Philippines.

Granville

This station shares its name with the CTA in Chicago and railway stations in Manche in France, Birmingham in the UK, and Sydney in Australia.

Lansdowne

We can find Lansdowne in the following places:

• Boston, Massachusetts
• Lansdowne, Pennsylvania
• Toronto, Ontario

This is the only situation where a station on the SkyTrain network has its name shared with another metro in Canada. I’ve used the Toronto and Boston stops and are the only pairs in this list I’ve been to.

Lincoln

Opened 168 years earlier in Lincoln, UK.

Nanaimo

Here’s my good reason: until 2011, the Expo Line and Vancouver Island’s City of Nanaimo had a station name pair. In the case of the city, this was a Via Rail station which once connected to the capital, Victoria.

Efforts have been made to revive rail service on the island since the service’s closure, but the provincial government has yet to give it serious consideration.

Royal Oak

Royal Oak shares its name with the one on the London Underground and an Amtrak station named Royal Oak in Michigan.

I have passed by it while on a train to Paddington which is a stop away.

Waterfront

This station shares its name with one on Washington DC’s Green Line metro. Until 2011, it was known as Waterfront-SEU.

I decided to ask ChatGPT a question I once had during a job interview before being hired on at my current company:

Tell me what to do as a cyber security professional working in an industrial control network when an HMI is compromised and human safety is possibly at risk

And its immediate response was to give me this answer:

If you’re a cybersecurity professional working in an industrial control network and you suspect that an HMI (Human Machine Interface) is compromised with potential risks to human safety, it’s crucial to take immediate and systematic steps to address the situation. Here’s a general guideline:

1. Isolate the Compromised System:
   • Identify the compromised HMI system and disconnect it from the network immediately to prevent further spread of the attack.
   • If possible, isolate the compromised system physically to ensure it cannot communicate with other networked devices.
2. Notify Relevant Personnel:
   • Alert the appropriate personnel, including operations, management, and IT security teams, about the compromise.
   • Activate the incident response team and emergency procedures as outlined in your organization’s cybersecurity and safety policies.

This has me quite pissed off.

The thing that ChatGPT did here was assume that industrial control security is handled no differently than enterprise or general computing; this is dead wrong.

Industrial control involves human safety and taking an HMI out of the equation can actually make matters worse. There have been documented situations where making arbitrary decisions such as the recommended “disconnect it from the network” can trigger cascading effects or outcomes that are undesired.

Unplugging an HMI from a PLC and a control network as a whole could cause a ripple effect that puts human lives in danger. An HMI is basically a computer (but built to withstand a rugged environment) and a PLC (programmable logic controller) is the interface the HMI interacts with to make machines do things. I am simplifying things greatly here, but the point is that they’re not regular computers.

ChatGPT correctly states to notify relevant personnel, but this both fails to put this at the start and doesn’t mention someone like a plant manager or similar role. You need people who are familiar with the equipment to do things like lockout, shutdown, et cetera–in my field we call them “subject matter experts” or “SMEs”.

If I am to hear of a compromised HMI, my instinct is to talk to the person overseeing the operations first and get them to help mitigate it before even dreaming of disconnecting anything unilaterally. I do not want to be responsible for or creating increased risk for human casualties.

This scares the fuck out of me.

Mt. Baker in Washington state