ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ert86]

Mike Farwell is suggesting the opening day will be in May. Which would be very pleasant!

Considering GRTs site states paper tickets will be sold until may and won't be accepted once ION starts I doubt it

[tomh009]

Mike Farwell is suggesting the opening day will be in May. Which would be very pleasant!

Considering GRTs site states paper tickets will be sold until may and won't be accepted once ION starts I doubt it

I don't expect that the GRT has inside knowledge of the LRT opening date.

[timc]

Although it sometimes seems like there is little coordination between GRT and ION, why would you say that?

[clasher]

I saw a near-collision at Charles & Frances tonight... the LRT was coming down Charles with the green light in its favour and a jackass at Frances decided to start creeping into the intersection for some reason... the horn seemed to scare them enough that they moved back in time, dunno wtf they were thinking.

[plam]

I saw a near-collision at Charles & Frances tonight... the LRT was coming down Charles with the green light in its favour and a jackass at Frances decided to start creeping into the intersection for some reason... the horn seemed to scare them enough that they moved back in time, dunno wtf they were thinking.

Yeah, there are reports of such things relatively often on the radio.

[Spokes]

Yikes. That would have been scary

[trainspotter139]

Although it sometimes seems like there is little coordination between GRT and ION, why would you say that?

Because the Rapid Transit team is operating completely separate from GRT.

[trainspotter139]

Mike Farwell is suggesting the opening day will be in May. Which would be very pleasant!

Does anyone know if this date allows them to complete testing? Just wondering if it is even feasible.

There's really not a lot to do left. From the sounds of the stuff they've been doing, they might be getting all their certification eggs into the same basket. They have certainly been doing the LRV dance in the yard the past couple of weeks.

[plam]

Does anyone know if this date allows them to complete testing? Just wondering if it is even feasible.

There's really not a lot to do left. From the sounds of the stuff they've been doing, they might be getting all their certification eggs into the same basket. They have certainly been doing the LRV dance in the yard the past couple of weeks.

There kind of seemed to be a lot of fault codes two weeks ago when I last listened to the radio. How's that been going? I think we need 600 hours of fault-code-free operation per train to certify, or am I wrong?

[trainspotter139]

There's really not a lot to do left. From the sounds of the stuff they've been doing, they might be getting all their certification eggs into the same basket. They have certainly been doing the LRV dance in the yard the past couple of weeks.

There kind of seemed to be a lot of fault codes two weeks ago when I last listened to the radio. How's that been going? I think we need 600 hours of fault-code-free operation per train to certify, or am I wrong?

I wouldn't read too much into that. Bombardier likely still has the trains running on a "Debug" version of the operating software which in all likelihood has ridiculously strict fault tolerances that the "Release" version wouldn't have.

[danbrotherston]

I saw a near-collision at Charles & Frances tonight... the LRT was coming down Charles with the green light in its favour and a jackass at Frances decided to start creeping into the intersection for some reason... the horn seemed to scare them enough that they moved back in time, dunno wtf they were thinking.

This does not surprise me one bit, I walk up this road daily, and multiple times a week I will have a driver creeping forward into the crosswalk while I'm crossing.

[Canard]

I’m amazed at the number of pedestrians I see crossing through the gates and lights without a care in the world. I can’t believe someone hasn’t been hit.

[Bob_McBob]

That's one of the reasons I'm always so annoyed about signal failures and traffic light timing issues, especially at locations like the University Ave crossing. It's training pedestrians in particular to not take it seriously.

[Canard]

Absolutely; this is the worst time for those kind of failures to occur, but by the nature of testing and integration, it’s exactly the time when they will.

For what it’s worth, when driving through Brantford on the weekend, we had to detour around a railway signal which was stuck down. Police were waving people to go down to the next street. I don’t ever recall coming across stuck crossings before, but perhaps I’m just more aware of it now that I’ve been following progress here.

[jamincan]

Is it possible that the unusually wet winter is wreaking havoc on a system that would normally be fine? If you saw this happen in Brantford, perhaps the problem is more wide spread than just with the ION gates. That said, it does seem to primarily be a problem with the gates north of Erb - I don't think I've heard any reports of stuck gates on the southern half.