ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[Canard]

Can someone make a video of a walk-around and walk-through of the ION LRV on Saturday? Sadly I'm out of town.

I would appreciate the same... travelling back from Ottawa on Saturday, and I'll miss the event.  

Absolutely!

I'm disappointed by the chime.  In my heart of hearts, I never gave up hope that they'd use the first seven notes of "The Chicken Dance".  

I had hoped for something unique, or at least this, which is my favourite of any system, anywhere:

Sounds like the chime they use on the new streetcars (appropriate since they come from the same place).

Yep - because it's actually not the "TTC Chime", it's the UTDC Chime:

The TTC chime is actually the UTDC chime; it was first introduced on the Scarborough RT (ICTS) in 1985, and has since been rolled out on many other ex-UTDC/Bombardier products, like GO's Bi-Level coaches.

But agreed that it's likely what we'll get, especially since our order is piggybacked on Metrolinx' order for the Eglinton Crosstown which is surely going to have the 3-tone chime. I was just hoping for something a bit more unique to us.

I have a bit more information I can share about the trains:

• The first two FLEXITY Freedom trains are "Pilot Trains" that Bombardier is building for Metrolinx.  Those two trains are in production, and will go to Millhaven (Kingston) for high-speed testing as I've mentioned before along the MOVIA test line on the North side of the site, where the Toronto Rocket (TR) trains were tested.
  
• FLEXITY Freedom train 3 is for Waterloo Region, and comes straight from Thunder Bay to Waterloo.
  
• When that happens, it'll run on the "test track" section of our line, from just South of Northfield, down to just North of the Erb/Caroline intersection.  GrandLinq is on track to have this finished in June.
  
• Train 3 (our first) has a burn-in period where it will run for quite a while, back and forth, along the spur (!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
  
• Colours: Rendering is accurate, but the grey is a little lighter.  Doors on the inside are the same blue as the outside, and seats are light blue with grey accents.
  
• Chime will be "TTC Chime" (3-tone) as Metrolinx wants a uniform, consistent look and feel to all trains on all projects going forward.
  
• Voice will be the same Text-to-Speech system on the FLEXITY Outlook LRV's (streetcars) that Toronto is taking delivery of right now.  Voice may be slightly different but tech module is the same (Yay!).