The most important route terminus operations for building ridership, of course, are the infrequent ones ... the operations to prevent a train swap from creating a service delay, and to prevent one service delay from cascading to multiple service delays.

But if they are through services through a terminal, with the route terminus located somewhere else, then that time buffer is also located somewhere else.

The restock, full clean, high frequency safety checks, etc., that are scheduled as the normal terminus operations are an efficient way to use the time, but for corridor trains that are not operating around the clock, many of them do not have to be done when they are, but are more spreading the work around and not letting the time buffers built into the system go to waste.

More on this in Part 3.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.