Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Brendan Dawe

@dawe.bsky.social

2.2K followers 480 following 7.8K posts

Your friendly neighbourhood Vancouverite Housing abundance enthusiast. Planning & Real Estate Consultant. Vive le Canada. Elbows Up

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 13h

what if he used the Immense Power of The State to tell CN to fix their shit? What if?!?

1 6

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 13h

it depends on who they outrage and who they divide

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 14h

my folks old house is 28 miles away from the nearest upzone :(

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 14h

emigration is more of a consequence than a cause of poor economic performance for most of the 19th century due to rampant Toryism

1 3

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 14h

yes, especially when they were rebuilding everything to serve the same electrified terminal

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 14h

Metra never but IC electrified 3/4 of their suburban services

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

picked it up from the discount bin at the Halton County Radial Railway Museum

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

that's a good point - the passenger and shorthaul freight traffic that benefited disproportionately from electrics would be much more relatively prominent under that scenario

1 1

Reposted by Brendan Dawe

Marco Chitti @chittimarco.bsky.social · 16h

I would pay to have a regional railway network around Montréal like Sydney has. I would probably go visit some new corners of QC every other weekend.

Do we have a plausible theory why Australia went all in on electric suburban trains from the 1920s, but Canada didn't?

Every Sydney Station @sydneystations.bsky.social · 16h

LEURA, 108km from Central, is another charming station - everything is so charming up in the Blue Mountains - serving retail strip of cute cafes and shops popular with tourists. It has two platforms cut into the sandstone, accessed from an overhead concourse on a road bridge, with a lift. (1/3)

21 11 97

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

Anywho, I will finish this one and get back to you

1 5

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

It’s still curious though- because it’s not as though Montreal and Toronto did not have mainline transit, and moreover Montreal had a small electric mainline network

1 2

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

CN in 1919 was trying to bandage up a lot of haemorrhages for the first few years of its existence

1 3

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

I suspect that the specific vector of US influence is that railway electrification primarily took the form of new-build interurbans

1 2

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

One of the real long term damaging things is that the Great Depression is a much worse thing in the US and Canada than elsewhere, which kills a lot of marginal electric railway investments. The post WWI recession is also unusually bad in Canada

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

In 1911 there were 629,503 people in Sydney and 588,854 in Melbourne vs only 490,504 in Montreal and 409,992 in Toronto. My understanding is that Australia has very limited rural/small town population compared to Canada. So modestly bigger (but richer) cities and less rural traffic to serve

2 7

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

Possible! Australia was much richer than Canada in the first decades of the 20th Century.

1 7

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

CN actually did make a pretty big investment in interurbans during the 1920s and it was not regarded as having payed off well. Of course it was interurbans, so the whole line died, rather than than mainlines

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 15h

The bankruptcy of all but one major railway and many of the smaller ones during the First World War following an expansion boom that left Canada with the biggest rail network per capita in the world

2 5

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 16h

Ya keep out those shoppers drug marts

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 18h

Montreal smoked meat or smoked salmon

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 21h

i was under the impression that most north american 'boar' are already just feral swine

1 1

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 21h

that's why you make sausages

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 21h

but surely they are delicious

1 2

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 21h

I am overlooking that these things were often badly planned on both the micro and macro scale

Brendan Dawe @dawe.bsky.social · 22h

I do hate to see this sort of infra go to waste. Is it truly unsalvable?

2 4