Trillium Line opening still 8-10 weeks away, maybe longer

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OC Transpo has begun its final 8-10 week “path to opening” of the Trillium Line, but Transit General Manager Renée Amilcar still won’t say if the long-delayed LRT line will be ready in time for the start of the Carleton University school year.

“We don’t want to work under pressure and give up the good work we’ve done so far,” Amilcar said Thursday when the city gave a detailed briefing on the countdown for the opening of the north-south Trillium Line.

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“We are at the beginning of those 8-10 weeks and, if everything is OK, after those 10 weeks we should be able to have good news for those students,” Amilcar said. “But today I won’t be able to provide any date.”

The Trillium Line was originally supposed to open in August 2022.

A full complement of nine trains have been running regularly since February on the Trillium Line, which consists of Line 2 from Bayview to Limebank and Line 4, a spur running from South Keys to the Ottawa airport. Since June, the trains have been running 18 hours a day, though not yet at the frequency they’ll need to maintain when full service begins.

In a special technical briefing Thursday to members of council and the media, Amilcar and Michael Morgan, the city’s director of rail construction, laid out the steps needed before the trains would run and how they’d keep councillors — and the public — informed of the progress.

The briefing was far different than what happened in the weeks and months before the troubled Confederation Line opened in 2019. The secrecy that surrounded Confederation Line testing was one of the major criticisms in Justice William Hourigan’s judicial inquiry into construction and operation of Line 1.

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“It’s a completely different approach as to how staff are communicating the steps that are needed before they can open,” said Stittsville Coun. Glen Gower, who was on council in 2019 and is now chair of the transit commission.

“We’re learning things weeks in advance now and certainly the opportunity to ask questions wasn’t there five years ago,” he said.

“It allows us all to feel like we’re experts on how you commission and do the final testing on the system.”

Eight of 13 Trillium Line stations have been approved for occupancy, with the remainder nearing completion, Morgan told the meeting. The fleet of diesel Alstom Coradia LINT and Stadler FLIRT trains are ready for use and 47 of the 55 operators have completed their training, he said.

OC Transpo expects to soon begin a 21-day trial run consisting of 14 days of simulated passenger service that must achieve 98.5 per cent reliability and seven days of emergency testing. A third-party independent certifier, Ricardo Rail, will oversee the testing to ensure it’s done correctly — another improvement to the process stemming from Hourigan’s recommendations.

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Councillors will also receive written daily summaries of the previous days’ test results, another big change from the Confederation Line trial run, when councillors were never told if the system had passed or failed or that the city had agreed to lower the agreed upon testing standard.

Key to opening the Trillium Line will be tests of the signalling and switching systems, a crucially important aspect of the line that operates on a single line of track for several sections of its 24-kilometre route.

“Week over week we are looking at having no switch issues,” Morgan said. “We’re looking for a slight improvement in vehicle reliability and some integration of the signal system. We need to clean those issues up before we start.”

Testing is expected to be stepped up starting this weekend and that will put the system under even more stress, he said.

“If there’s anything else that comes up, we should know in the next couple of weeks or so,” Morgan said.

Once the trial run is completed successfully, the city will require certification from Transport Canada and the Canadian Transportation Authority to begin operating. Amilcar would not say if OC Transpo will offer a period of free service for the Trillium Line, as it did when the Confederation Line opened in 2019. That information will be presented to city council at a later date, she said.

The next detailed briefing is expected at an Aug. 29 meeting of the light rail sub-committee.

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