Ottawa’s troubled LRT trains are off the rails again. Advocates demand answers

There hasn't been a single train running for weeks, and there won't be until repairs are made and the system is deemed safe.

The gravel strewn across the bike path was the first sign of trouble.

Ottawa resident Steven Grant was out for a ride on Sept. 19 when he noticed an LRT train stopped in the middle of the tracks. Gravel from the bed under the rails had been scattered all over the nearby path.

“The second and third cars of that train set were clearly off the rails,” Grant said in an interview Thursday. “You could see the side panel, the kind of cowling over the wheels, is totally, totally damaged.”

Later investigations revealed the train was already in a state of derailment when it left the station with 12 people on board, and travelled that way across a rail bridge over a major six-lane roadway before hitting a signal mast and switch heater.

The driver hit the emergency brake and stopped just on the other side of the bridge.

In any other city, Grant said he would have been surprised to come across a sight like that, but this is Ottawa’s Confederation Line, and the derailment was the second one in as many months.

The $2-billion line, a major infrastructure project in Canada’s capital city that had been more than a decade in the making, opened just two years ago. It’s been plagued by calamities big and small.

A sinkhole swallowed a major downtown thoroughfare during construction. Door jams delayed the line for hours. Wheels developed flat spots. The stations smelled of raw sewage for some time. Salt spray from Ottawa’s roads gummed up the electrical works. Showers of sparks would occasionally cascade past the windows because the arm that connects the train to the power lines kept losing contact. These are just a few of the things.