Tag Archives: Skytrain

Rail Photo of the Month: August 2020

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Bombardier Mark II Car 204

Bombardier Mark II Car 204

Location: VCC/Clark Station, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Operator of Vehicle: British Columbia Rapid Transit Company
Date of Photo: August 7, 2007

SkyTrain is certainly one of the most unique transit systems I’ve been on.  At one time, it was the longest fully automated driverless system in the world, but it has since been surpassed by systems in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur (though it is still the longest rapid transit system in all of Canada).  The mostly elevated system averages speeds of 28 MPH (45 KPH) including stops, significantly faster than standard buses or even the B-Line buses I wrote about for the August 2020 Bus Photo of the Month.  The system includes what was the longest cable-supported transit-only bridge in the world from 1990 until 2019, aptly named SkyBridge, and also uses the Dunsmuir Tunnel in Downtown Vancouver, originally constructed in 1932 for use by the Canadian Pacific Railway from 1932.

I rode the entire system in 2007 during my only visit to Vancouver.  Since then, the Canada Line and Evergreen Extension have both opened, and the Expo Line and Millennium Line use a type of rolling stock that was only ordered and delivered in the past four years.  I hope to visit Vancouver and explore its transit system again at some point in the future, and certainly encourage others to do the same, as Vancouver is a delightful place to visit.

For more photos of Skytrain, please click here.

Oren’s Reading List: Riding an entire system in a day

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Bombardier Mark II Car 204
The Vancouver Sun reports that today, a man named Stephen Quinlan intends to ride the entire Vancouver SkyTrain system in about 3 hours, in order to set the Guinness World Record for achieving the feat.  You can read about his preparations here.  I made no effort to set a record while doing so, but I did ride the entire Skytrain in a single day on August 7, 2007, back when it only had two lines and fewer stations.  It isn’t the first system I rode in an entire day, either.  The largest system I rode in a single day is the Washington, DC Metrorail (in 2002, when it only had 83 stations), but I have also explored the entire TTC Subway (2007), San Juan Tren Urbano (2016), Glasgow Underground (2005), Rome Metro (2008), Jerusalem Light Rail (on opening day in 2011) and Haifa Carmelit (2007) in a single day, and did the Tren Urbano, Jerusalem Light Rail, and Carmelit on a single fare.  Needless to say, it is a much easier feat to achieve on a smaller system such as Haifa’s (the smallest subway in the world) as opposed to a city such as London or New York, but that is to be expected.  

Have you ever tried to ride an entire system in one day?  Were you successful?  Were you trying to set any records?  Feel free to post your answers in the comments below!

Oren’s Reading List is an occasional feature on The Travelogue in which I share articles that I’ve read that might also be of interest to the readers of this website.