Crazy train: Strange days as Ottawa's $2.1B LRT faces another crisis of confidence
After a pair of derailments and a cracked wheel, the Confederation Line is out of service indefinitely. What will it take to get the city's troubled light rail line working consistently again?
Jon Willing, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Oct 02, 2021 • 4 hours ago • 6 minute read
It’s one of the strangest times in the history of public transit in Canada’s capital city.
The most expensive infrastructure project in the city of Ottawa’s history, the completed $2.1-billion Confederation Line, is out of order. Operator OC Transpo needs to redirect enough buses each day to quickly move paying customers, providing enough capacity to allow physical distancing during a pandemic.
Meanwhile, the head of the transit agency has retired from the municipal government and the new general manager doesn’t start until Oct. 18, leaving Transpo’s temporary bus-only operations in the hands of the city’s rail construction boss with support from the city manager’s office.
On top of that, there are three ongoing LRT investigations at the Transportation Safety Board — the two derailments this summer and a wheel-crack problem discovered in 2020 — and the city has been verifying whether its contractor, Rideau Transit Group (RTG), has finally solved legacy deficiencies after issuing a notice of default to the consortium in March 2020.
Transit ridership has severely dropped as COVID-19 has thousands of workers commuting only as far as their home offices, and now the mayor and the transit commission chair want to turn off the fare boxes and open the gates for the entire month of December (something Transpo has never done before) to win back confidence in public transit, and specifically, the two-year-old LRT system.
Even though it’s early in the life of Ottawa LRT, residents have lost faith in the electric rail system and are looking to city hall for accountability.
Can the city put the train’s crazy days behind it?
Maybe, but definitely not on its own.
While the city operates the LRT, its largely reduced to a managerial role when it comes to the health of the system, due to a public-private partnership with RTG. The company’s affiliate, Rideau Transit Maintenance (RTM) is responsible for taking care of the Alstom Citadis Spirit trains, tracks and stations for 30 years.
For city councillors looking for someone to hold responsible, it’s the source of much aggravation.
The city’s power comes in holding back maintenance payments, in the range of $4 million-to-$5-million each month, but that doesn’t do much to soothe transit customers who live with longer bus commutes when the LRT isn’t fit to run.
The two main-line derailments in September and October are the most jaw-dropping breakdowns in the Confederation Line’s short history. Reading the preliminary observations from the TSB, the derailments shared one distressing thing in common: trains ran for a period of time while they were showing signs of breakdown.
When it came to the Aug. 8 derailment, the TSB believes there was evidence of trouble on the train before it made the 12.5-kilometre journey across the downtown and was placed out of service for what maintenance staff thought was a brake problem. While a technician saw burn marks on a brake disk, there was critical damage on the other car of the double train. An axle’s cartridge assembly overheated, leading to a severed wheel.
On Sept. 19, a westbound train pulled into Tremblay Station already off the rails and left the station in that state, according to the TSB. The derailed train crossed the bridge over Riverside Drive before stopping. The regulator hasn’t released its theory about the cause of the derailment.
No one was injured in either incident, but the city is now experiencing an extended closure of the service to fix the infrastructure from the Sept. 19 derailment and bring in an independent consultant to create a return-to-service strategy.
At the political level, council members are asking city management to lay out how the 30-year maintenance contract could be cancelled — what has often been called the “nuclear” scenario at city hall — and suss out what it would take to create a Confederation Line maintenance division inside the municipal government.
Other councillors want the city to request a judicial inquiry to dig into the creation of the LRT system and contracts.
What makes the Ottawa LRT mess even more baffling is that the problems are happening despite the collective construction, engineering and transit experience of RTG’s parent companies. ACS Infrastructure, EllisDon and SNC-Lavalin aren’t novices, nor is the company responsible making and maintaining the trains, Alstom.
Before leaving city hall, recently retired general manager of transportation John Manconi told reporters that “everything is fixable,” repeating a line he’s delivered at other times when the LRT has underperformed.
But getting the attention of “Alstom, Alstom, Alstom,” the French train builder that provided the LRT’s trains, is critical, Manconi said.
Something isn’t clicking with the maintenance regime put together by RTG and RTM, where two-thirds of the 200-plus workforce are Alstom workers. The August derailment is a clear example, with the TSB suggesting that the maintenance program is “insufficient” for one specific safety matter when it comes to the cartridge assembly for the train wheels.
As for how things are going these days at RTG and RTM, the organizations are unable to publicly comment on matters related to the Confederation Line unless they receive permission from the city, as per the terms in its contract.
Work continues to get LRT back online, but there hasn’t been a confirmed timeline for a return to service.
The transit commission has required city management to hire an independent expert to make sure the LRT system is safe before trains start rolling again.
Finding a fresh set of eyes to review LRT is becoming more difficult for a city that continues to require studies of its new transit system. There has been a delay in trying to find the right consultant for the latest review.
“We also wanted someone to get here quickly so they can get started on the work,” city manager Steve Kanellakos said in an interview on the day he announced to council that he was not going to hire a consultant that had done LRT-related work for the city in the past.
But while taxpayers, transit riders and council members gnash their teeth over a long list of LRT delays and problems, at least one expert says what the city is facing isn’t unusual.
Gordon Lovegrove, a University of British Columbia engineering professor with an interest in sustainable transportation, who had a problem-free, non-eventful ride on the Confederation Line when he visited Ottawa last month, said that even after two years of operation it wouldn’t be unusual for an LRT system to still have kinks. What’s critical is to get engineers on the case.
“This is the normal shakedown,” Lovegrove said in an interview. “What Ottawa is going through, it’s nothing new.”
Lovegrove said he can understand the political pressure at city hall, especially when there are reputations at stake, compounded by the fact that it’s the nation’s capital.
“Clearly everybody and their dog want the system to succeed, including the people who want to ride on it and depend on it,” he said. “Reliability is critical if you’re going to get ridership.”
Adding a new technology to a transit system is also about the city adopting “a whole new culture,” Lovegrove said, drawing comparisons to the beginning of Vancouver’s SkyTrain more than 35 years ago.
“If you don’t take a risk, there’s not going to be progress,” Lovegrove said. “It can only go up from here.”
jwilling@postmedia.com
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