Additional LRT shutdowns coming this June for 'significant maintenance'

Additional closures of the Confederation Line LRT are coming later this spring as OC Transpo and Rideau Transit Group work to fix issues with the less than four-year-old light rail transit line.

RTG CEO Nicolas Truchon told reporters that in addition to the planned partial shutdowns that have already been announced for the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May, "significant maintenance" is also planned the first half of June.

"That work is going to involve work in the tunnel with respect to the water leaks but it's also going to involve much more significant maintenance with respect to the rest of the infrastructure, specifically the grinding of the track to reduce corrugation as well as the other ancillary work that would be associated with that," Truchon said.

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Transit Services general manager Renée Amilcar said discussions about how that work will be undertaken are ongoing. She suggested there could be line closures as well as single-track shut downs, but the details have yet to be confirmed.

"We're still working with the parties about which days that we'll close everything and some days we'll just do single-tracking," Amilcar said. "It's an ongoing process, but we'll come back ASAP with a memo to council and the media."

Truchon said the work in April and May would be used to determine plans for future tunnel work.

"We're targeting to do repairs in the second weekend shutdown and then, depending on how those repairs perform, we will expand the methodology to other sections of the tunnel. So, we're doing test sections over the next two weekends so that then we can focus and deploy the program on a much broader scale," he said.

Addressing issues with how the wheels of the light rail vehicles interact with the rail was one of the inquiry's recommendations. It included a suggestion that tracks be replaced. When asked about the possibility of replacing track on some or all of the Confederation Line, Truchon said they're not ready to do that just yet.

"We're not ready to rip out sections of the track yet. This was one hypothesis that was put forward. We're working with our technical experts to identify issues with respect to the configuration, the alignment, the build with respect to the track," he said. "For the time being the focus is about the grinding campaign that we're going to have this coming summer, which is going to reduce a phenomenon that we call corrugation, and we're working with RTM and Alstom to come up with the right profile with respect to the wheel-to-rail interface, so we're working on those parameters before going down the road of ripping out track."

This comes on the heels of a technical briefing Wednesday, during which the City of Ottawa said it would be releasing an action plan on how it intends to address the 103 recommendations made by the Ottawa Light Rail Public Inquiry.

The briefing was heavily technical and provided a broad overview of the city's response to the inquiry. 

The action plan, released just before 5 p.m. Wednesday, says as of April 17, 2023, 36 of the 103 recommendations are considered complete or have been incorporated into ongoing city policies for implementation in future projects. Eight of the recommendations lie within the jurisdiction of the provincial and federal governments and cannot be implemented through this municipal action plan. The remainder are to be completed by the end of the year, Amilcar said.

Staff said during the briefing that the city hired consulting firm Roland Berger to oversee the action plan. Roland Berger partner Dominique Gautier OC Transpo's action plan is "robust, exhaustive, and highly relevant to the Public Inquiry Report's recommendations."

Last fall, the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Commission issued a 637-page report on the construction and maintenance of the $2.1-billion Confederation Line, which has been plagued with problems since its launch in 2019.

• 10 takeaways from the Ottawa LRT Inquiry final report
• Read the conclusion of the Ottawa LRT report executive summary

The report found persistent failures in leadership and "egregious violations of the public trust" on behalf of now-former city officials, including Jim Watson, the former mayor, ex-city manager Steve Kanellakos, and John Manconi, the former general manager of transit services.

Key among them include continuing remedial measures intended to ensure the safe and reliable operation of the system following the Aug. 8, 2021 derailment, and improve maintenance practices, monitor the wheel/rail interface, and minimize the impacts on the rail and vehicle components.

Staff said the lessons learned from the launch of Stage 1 are being integrated into Stage 2. For example, there was no soft launch for the Confederation Line. Buses ran parallel to the line only briefly before routes were fully realigned to the LRT. That led to signficant issues almost immediately for commuters. According to the action plan, staff have decided to to retain the replacement buses in service over the first winter after the north-south Trillium Line expansion opens, in order to help reduce the pressure on the new service and to ensure that alternative service is readily available if there is an issue with rail service.

Another difference is the commitment to provide daily updates during trial running in Stage 2. During Stage 1, city staff said they would provide zero updates until the trial running was complete, and the inquiry found that changes to the testing criteria during the trial running were not communicated to members of council.

The inquiry was called after two derailments six weeks apart in the summer of 2021, the second of which forced a shutdown of the line for almost two full months. Since then, service has been interrupted for days at a time due to a lightning strike in July 2022 and a winter storm this past January. The April 5 ice storm also caused a shutdown of the line for more than 30 hours.

OTTAWA LRT ACTION PLAN

TECHNICAL BRIEFING