FLEXITY Freedom, while a completely new product for North America, is a variant of the already successful top-of-the-line FLEXITY 2 operating in Europe and Australia (G:link). I'm all but certain that the North American team started off with the CAD from FLEXITY 2 as a baseline and modified whatever they needed to modify to satisfy North American regulations. I know the cab frame, at the very least, is significantly beefed up from the European version. I can't imagine what kind of catastrophic flaws might be uncovered that would require it to go back to Bombardier for repair (beyond frame issues - more on that below). The bogies, I believe, are actually from Europe - they're probably the most complicated single-component on the train. Bombardier has a factory that actually does nothing but bogies for all their products!
There have been horror stories in the industry with major problems being uncovered well into deliveries. Most recently, Honolulu's Hitachi trains for their fully-automated light metro are in real trouble - they've uncovered a problem deep within the floor frame that requires something like 20 of their already-built trains to be completely stripped apart to access them to replace the faulty extruded-aluminium beams. Absolutely catastrophic. I think it was somewhere in Finland (going off memory) where another LRV vendor had to take back a huge number of their fleet due to frame cracking - track geometry was putting undue torque on the frames and cracking them apart - again, all internal stuff, where you have to strip it down to the frame to get at/replace bits. Not good!
Toronto's FLEXITY Outlook LRV's are structurally similar enough to ours, and they've got a couple of years under their belts on a very poorly designed (geometry-wise) network that was never anticipated to be used with fixed-bogie LRV's. They haven't yet had any issues with frame torque, so I think we'll be okay.
Maybe a closer analogy might be taking home the first production vehicle off the line of a car developed off of a concept vehicle. Somebody's got to be first. They might find a way after vehicle 4 to re-route a wiring harness that makes it a little easier to put together, but it doesn't affect the car already built. In 5 years when they need to access it, they'll just re-route it at that time, for the future. That kind of thing. You're right that our vehicles haven't gone through the dynamic (speed) testing that they should have - and that will be done by Bombardier on-site on our own test track.
I've been dragging my heels on writing up an article about fixed-bogie LRV's and the pros and cons to them - and the solutions a system like ours is forced to implement to mitigate the cons. With it snowing today and being so cold, maybe I won't go for a bike ride and I'll do that instead.
There have been horror stories in the industry with major problems being uncovered well into deliveries. Most recently, Honolulu's Hitachi trains for their fully-automated light metro are in real trouble - they've uncovered a problem deep within the floor frame that requires something like 20 of their already-built trains to be completely stripped apart to access them to replace the faulty extruded-aluminium beams. Absolutely catastrophic. I think it was somewhere in Finland (going off memory) where another LRV vendor had to take back a huge number of their fleet due to frame cracking - track geometry was putting undue torque on the frames and cracking them apart - again, all internal stuff, where you have to strip it down to the frame to get at/replace bits. Not good!
Toronto's FLEXITY Outlook LRV's are structurally similar enough to ours, and they've got a couple of years under their belts on a very poorly designed (geometry-wise) network that was never anticipated to be used with fixed-bogie LRV's. They haven't yet had any issues with frame torque, so I think we'll be okay.
Maybe a closer analogy might be taking home the first production vehicle off the line of a car developed off of a concept vehicle. Somebody's got to be first. They might find a way after vehicle 4 to re-route a wiring harness that makes it a little easier to put together, but it doesn't affect the car already built. In 5 years when they need to access it, they'll just re-route it at that time, for the future. That kind of thing. You're right that our vehicles haven't gone through the dynamic (speed) testing that they should have - and that will be done by Bombardier on-site on our own test track.
I've been dragging my heels on writing up an article about fixed-bogie LRV's and the pros and cons to them - and the solutions a system like ours is forced to implement to mitigate the cons. With it snowing today and being so cold, maybe I won't go for a bike ride and I'll do that instead.