Walkey site characteristics

Residents near the Walkley site have voiced their concern for the natural characteristics of the Walkley site. These concerns will be heard at the PWG meeting tonight.

It's my belief that these concerns can be easily mitigated by designing the facility to best use the area available at the Walkley site. We've already seen that the space available is ample enough to put two maintenance facilities. The pic in the previous post shows that the buildings could be placed at the East end of the site. We also know that the NCC is selling 7 hectares of land West of Albion which could also be used for this project. (pic)


Let's look at Calgary's Haysboro storage area, pic at right. This description comes from Tim L.:

It's a photo of the Haysboro LRV Storage Facilities
on Calgary's LRT line. The site is north of the
Anderson main storage & maintenance facility.

This shows how long, skinny buildings work
just fine as secondary storage facilities, and would
be easy to fit anywhere in Walkley Yard, without
having to wipe out any of the greenspace north
of the yard.

The larger building has five tracks in it for storing
LRV's. Note that the tracks only enter one end
of the building. At Walkley, we could easily have
a similar building with doors on both ends, for
greater operational flexibility.

The smaller building above it is for parts storage.
One can see a three car LRT train beside it.

Remember, we won't run anything more than a
two car train here in Ottawa, so that the productivity
of light rail will never appear to be too much better
than our buses. :)

Using long and narrow storage buildings is also a cost saving for the city - less switches required, less entrances required, easier to build.

It is clear that the design of the maintenance/storage facility is very important to minimizing the encroachment on greenspace. Mitigation should be built into the plans.