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Residents will learn the anticipated start date for the long-delayed Trillium Line O-Train on Thursday.
Renée Amilcar, general manager of transit services for the City of Ottawa, and Richard Holder, director of rail construction, “will provide information on the status of trial running of O-Train Lines 2 and 4, including the anticipated start date,” the city said in a media release Wednesday.
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The Trillium Line has been closed since May 2020 and was originally scheduled to re-open in August 2022, but construction delays, many of them pandemic-related, fouled that timeline. Past target openings — October 2023, December 2023, spring 2024 — have come and gone.
The Trillium Line runs north-south from Bayview Station, with Line 2 extending to Limebank Road, while Line 4 is a spur from South Keys to the Ottawa airport. Together they will add 16 kilometres of track and 12 new stations to the existing Confederation Line (Line 1) LRT service.
Unlike the electric trains on the Confederation Line, the Trillium Line uses diesel-powered Alstom Coradia LINT and Stadler FLIRT trains. Those trains have been running regularly all summer, although glitches in the electronic data collection has hampered testing.
Last spring, OC Transpo outlined the testing process for the train, which it promised would be much more open than occurred before the Confederation Line opened in September 2019.
During the testing period, the trains will operate for 14 days with full simulated passenger service, and they must maintain a 98.5-per-cent on-time performance. That means stopping at each station for no more than three minutes and departing within 30 seconds of the scheduled time. The 98.5-per-cent target will be calculated from a rolling average over the 14-day testing period.
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That 14-day trial run will be followed by another seven days of testing that won’t count toward the train’s pass/fail outcome, but will allow operators to see how the system reacts to problems like immobilized trains or jammed doors.
Councillors will receive daily summaries of test results, something that wasn’t done during Confederation Line testing and was harshly criticized by Justice William Hourigan in his judicial inquiry into Ottawa’s LRT.
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