posted on March 28, 2009

West end joins Weston to fight train

New residents' groups are waking up to the fact that the airport express may bring noise, dirt and pollution

By: JEFF GRAY
Published: MARCH 28, 2009
Source: the Globe and Mail

Catherine Hume and her children, 10-month-old Phoenix and four-year-old Rivi, live on Golden Avenue, a west-end street of modest and mismatched homes that dead-ends against a green sheet-metal wall. Beyond it are the GO Train tracks that carry commuters home to Brampton and beyond.

Ms. Hume, 41, and her neighbours - their brood of toddlers and preschoolers running around in the early spring cold - say they don't mind the noise of the 50 or so trains a day. One mother, just a door from the tracks, even teaches music lessons in her foyer.

But for the hundreds of thousands who live along the Georgetown rail line, which cuts through gentrifying west-end Toronto neighbourhoods such as the Junction, Roncesvalles and Liberty Village, life may be about to change.

There could be 220 trains a day by 2013, when privately operated express trains from Union Station to Pearson Airport start running 140 times a day and GO Transit has also dramatically increased the frequency of its service. By 2031, there could be more than 350 trains a day. And all of them would be powered by diesel locomotives, producing what activists warn will be a cloud of pollution equal to the exhaust of a dozen highway lanes.

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