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Ottawa’s long-awaited Trillium Line will open Jan. 6.
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Transit General Manager Renée Amicar announced the day the city’s newest LRT line will begin carrying passengers at a briefing at city hall on Dec. 6, calling it “a milestone we have all been looking forward to.”
The Stage 2 extension of the O-train to the south provides service on Line 2 between Bayview Station and Limebank Station in the city’s south end and includes a spur — Line 4 — between South Keys and the Ottawa airport.
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All told, Lines 2 and 4 add 19 kilometres of track and 12 stations, eight of them new, to Ottawa’s light-rail network.
“I’m proud of the work we have done and I am confident in the system,” Amilcar said. “The benefits of this system will be felt across our city.
“I want to thank council and the residents of Ottawa for your patience through this project.”
The system will have a phased opening, beginning with Monday to Friday service and include parallel bus service running concurrently with the train.
The opening phase will run for a minimum of two weeks before expanding six-day service for at least another two weeks, before opening for the final phase and full seven-day service.
Opening the system in winter is unusual for an LRT system, Amilcar said, and shutting down on weekends will allow OC Transpo to do any maintenance and adjustments it needs. Opening in phases is one of the lesson learned from the problems opening the Confederation Line, she said.
The parallel bus service will continue until OC Transpo decides it’s no longer required, she said.
The start of revenue service is more than two years behind its original schedule, a delay the city says is mostly due to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The Trillium Line will provide service to Carleton University students, who have been without LRT service since the previous O-Train track was shut down in the spring of 2020.
Unlike the electric trains that run on the east-west Confederation Line, the Trillium Line will have diesel trains, which will go every 12 minutes and can carry up to 600 passengers, with 300 in each of their two cars. OC Transpo says the service will increase the capacity of the old O-Train by 60 per cent and cut 15 minutes off the time to travel to downtown Ottawa by bus.
Builder TransitNEXT completed a 14-day trial run in October, scoring a reliability rating of 99.5 per cent in a rolling average of on-time performance over the testing period.
The city and an independent reviewer agreed that TransitNEXT had achieved “substantial completion” of the project on Nov. 26. That was followed by an approval of the operating licence by federal regulators.
That was followed by an approval of the operating licence by federal regulators: a Certificate of Fitness by the Canadian Transportation Agency and the Railway Operation Certificates from Transport Canada. Both of those have now been received, said the city’s Director of Rail Construction Richard Holder.
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