🚀 go-pugleaf

johansen@portal.ca (George Johansen) writes:

>In article <318ef67c.3973933@news.mindlink.net>, Mr_Gigabyte@mindlink.net
>(Mike Quigley) wrote:

>> But why did they stop six-car Skytrains? Wasn't it due to the fact that the
>> computers freaked out or something?

>Purely my sometimes faulty recollection here, but I believe they were
>running six car trains when they were having software problems. 
>Apparently the quantity of four car trains was overloading, so they went
>to fewer trains, but maintained capacity by using them in six car
>combinations.

That's my recollection too. ISTR also that the six-car trains filled the 
platforms almost exactly, so there'd not be enough length to fit an 8-car 
train.

>And eventually the software problems got fixed.  I also speculate that
>with six car trains, bus service would have to be reconsidered in the
>stations.  i.e. if unloading passengers from a four car train can almost
>fill a bus, what happens when a single bus awaits the unloading of a six
>car train?

This is not how it works, though, surely? The passengers off a typical 
train are distributed over a number of bus routes, so the ones destined 
for a particular route might fill only a quarter of a bus. In the 
situation described above, the passengers are still arriving at the same 
rate, so that 1/4 busfull every 4 minutes and 1/3 busfull every 5 work 
out to the same thing (near enough).

Ken.

--
----------------Boring factual .sig:
Ken Butler, Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6;
kbutler@sfu.ca; http://www.sfu.ca/~kbutler/