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Comment by borne0 | Hacker News Reader

The trains should only run on tracks that are completely enclosed (More control on the environment will realize better reliability, and as an aside nicer living space. Raised tracks are ugly.), Also they should run on rubber wheels like the Montreal metro has since 1966.

Both metros should have barrier between platforms and tracks since they know where the doors will open. It's sad but a non-negligible cause of delays are due to people jumping on the tracks.

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As someone who's lived in both Montreal and the Washington DC area (and used Metro for commuting in both), I have to say that a mixture of raised and buried tracks are really the only way to have a practical system if you want it to work beyond the dense downtown area. Many of the more open places in metropolitan Montreal like Lachine don't have any Metro stops due to the expense of digging tunnels to there. In contrast, you can take the Washington Metro from Fairfax, VA and Rockville, MD. both well over twenty miles from downtown DC.

Yes I totally agree with you, I'd love it if the metro was far more expansive than it currently is in Montreal. For me the solution is to expand the metro system to the west island, south shore, etc but forget about burying it and just put it above ground in a tube. Initially it sounds silly but the current rolling stock and tracks aren't up to the task of dealing with Montreal weather, but maintaining one system is (I think) more feasible than our current system (metro, trains, upcoming light rail, etc)

Every now and again I look at the 1960s photos of the implementation of the metro system and the main idea that I take away from it is that something of that scale is pretty much impossible today.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/archivesmontreal/sets/72157664...

Looks like the subway constructed there was done using cut & cover tunnels, which is commonly done today, its only when you get below a certain depth or have preexisting structures that you'd use a tunnel boring machine.

For rail those tend to be fairly reliable, though most rail alignments buy two or three so they can bore from both ends, and have a spare in case it pulls a Bertha (Seattle's recent highway tunneling nightmare).

What is different today is how impacts are considered. Politically savvy communities are able to cause perfectly good rights of way with existing rail to not be used for light rail or commuter rail. Happened over in Bellevue, much to the detriment of the city and its surrounding towns. Microsoft ain't too happy about that one!

> Both metros should have barrier between platforms and tracks since they know where the doors will open.

This only works for environments with one type of rolling stock only. It's not uncommon that you take a ride in a decades-old train (e.g. the oldest trains in the Munich subway hail from 1971, they are expected to run for essentially over 50 years!), switch lines at a station and end up in a train that rolled off the factory line 2 years ago. Each new train generation has, for example, different door widths, door positions, even the number of doors per wagon can change.

That's true. Montreal just upgraded their rolling stock: (The MR-73 didn't owe them anything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MR-73) but the new cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPM-10) have the doors in the same place as the MR-73 cars.

Admittedly I hadn't thought of that, but I don't think there's that much variety in rolling stock for a given location, and when speccing out replacements I don't think it's too much to ask that the doors are in the same place (cars are purchased in dozens...), maybe I'm wrong. Montreal is a much smaller network than New York.

>when speccing out replacements I don't think it's too much to ask that the doors are in the same place (cars are purchased in dozens...)

that pretty much only works if you have 1 generation of rolling stock currently in use, and you know (or forsee) that you want to install platform doors. considering that the new york subways were built before platform doors were a thing, I can totally see how door location wasn't even a concern when purchasing rolling stock.

Exactly. The generations don't HAVE to have different dimensions. There's no worldwide metro standard across all dimensions leading to "common" models, every subway system requires custom made. Of course they can work them in, like they do in Montreal (where I see them working harmoniously)

Japan accomplished that though. They just use a very wide barrier door, or (still in development) movable barrier.

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