Buzzer logo

TransLink news, commentary, and behind-the-scenes stories.

A sneak peek at the new Hamilton Transit Centre! (photos)

A sneak peek at the new Hamilton Transit Centre! (photos)

Check out the new buildings!
Check out the new buildings!

In order to move over 400,000 people on transit everyday in Metro Vancouver and prepare for a growing region, it’s important to keep Metro Vancouver buses organized, fueled up and safe. Today I’m proud to announce that our newest facility, the Hamiliton Transit Centre (HTC), is well on its way to completion!

The buildings

The new facility will perform three functions: bus dispatch, bus service (fuel and wash) and bus maintenance. Buses and bus operators servicing the Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby and Vancouver areas will begin and complete service from this location.

Once completed, the 7.3 hectare site located in a light-industrial area in east Richmond will support the operations and maintenance of a fleet of 300 forty-foot equivalent (FFE) buses, including up to 80 Community Shuttle buses and 150 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) fuelled buses. Sixty-foot buses will also be accommodated at the centre.

HTC features a maintenance building, service delivery building, waste water treatment building, bus washing building and fueling building.

Bus operators will receive their daily assignments in the service delivery building and collect their buses from the parking lanes. Buses due for overnight fueling and washing will be collected from the buildings and returned to the parking lane, while buses due for maintenance will be parked in bays south of the maintenance building. Because there will be CNG buses at HTC, the building requires different design considerations, including floors with radiant heat. The waste water treatment plant processes oily water and waste from the facility.

One thing that strikes you when looking at the buildings at HTC is the wood ceilings and roofs.

The HTC lighting design has also been developed to keep as much light as possible directed to the facility and not the surrounding residential sites.

A bit of history and details on HTC

TransLink and Coast Mountain Bus saw the need for a new facility and started planning for it in 2009. Construction began in 2013 with a final completion date in 2017.

HTC will increase the capacity for maintenance and storage to 2,005 FFE buses allowing room to grow our current fleet of 1,611 FFE.

What’s next?

Even though the centre won’t be completely finished until 2017, the plan is to have buses housed and running service out of the facility by the fall!

Have we piqued your interest about HTC? Well, we’ll be planning a livestream of the centre really soon. What do you think about that?

Author: Robert Willis

TransLink

Sorry, your website browser is no longer supported.

Upgrade to one of these browsers to visit translink.ca: