New Trolleys and Frost
This is the story of my commute to work this morning. When I left the building, I could see a new trolley bus approaching my stop. Excellent! I wasn’t going to have to wait in the (below freezing) cold at all! But then I realized that the bus wasn’t moving. It was stopped and its hazard flashers were on. And I am thinking to myself: “Oh, oh. That’s not good. Doesn’t bode well.”
To my surprise, the bus started moving again only a few seconds later, and I was relieved. Way too early, as it would soon turn out. Leaving our stop, we started down Fraser Street slowly, to the noisy beeping of the bus, complaining that it couldn’t get power from the power lines. The beeping soon turned into an angry, continuous alarm. When that happened, the bus driver would go to “work the poles”: park the bus, get off, knock the ice of the poles and/or power lines and start going again. Within the next two blocks, the bus driver had to stop three times to to this. And every time, the bus would complain again pretty much immediately. So, it took about 3-4 minutes to travel a distance that normally takes 10-15 seconds.
When I saw two more buses having the exact same problems going the other way, I knew it was time for me to get off the trolley and use bus lines I know are serviced by diesel buses. All the while, I kept wondering why the old trolley buses never seemed to have this issue, but I was not going to go through any more slowly creeping down Fraser street on the #8 and follow that up by slowly creeping down Broadway on the #9. I took the #25 over to Knight, instead, and the #22 to Clark and 6th Avenue, which is about a block from VCC-Clark Skytrain station.
That didn’t work out too badly. It took me about 50 minutes to get to work that way. It should have been more like 35 minutes going the regular way, but oh well. Could have been much worse. I am pretty sure staying on the #8 would have been.
The only thing that sucks is that I was leaving home early to make some phone calls to Austria before starting work (on my cell, not using the work line for that), but by the time I got into the office, it was past 5:00pm over there already and everybody had already gone home. Without this issue, I would have made it on time.
And this is what almighty Translink has to say about the frost disaster:
Coast Mountain Bus Co.Trolley bus service is slowly being restored, but there are still major delays.
Diesel buses are being used on some trolley routes, and this may cause slight delays on routes normally served by diesels.
Suburban routes coming into Vancouver are picking up local customers, as well. B-Line buses are picking up at all stops for the time-being, as well.
Old trolley buses with ice cutters are being used to clear the overhead lines, thereby setting free more and more of the new trolleys.
We remind customers to please dress warmly and exercise patience on this commute.
The City of Vancouver has closed Yukon Street at West 7th Avenue, therefore 50 service will re-route via West 5th Avenue, Columbia Street, Broadway to regular route.
I “like” the “dress warmly” part the best. Fun stuff — not.
And how come the old trolleys have ice cutters and the new ones don’t? How come nobody clued into this before trolley bus service broke down this morning? Is it going to be like this for the rest of the cold season or are they going to wake up and do something to prevent this in the future?
