ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[trainspotter139]

502 only needed Grandlinq's work to be able to test it. the only vehicle that needs Bombardier to work on it more is 501. They haven't shipped us any incomplete vehicles since 501. The work that region has asked Bombardier to do on the completed vehicles there is to make the modifications (that Bombardier been making to perfect the overall design and process) to the completed ones in addition to the ones being built. This is so that there is a unified approach to maintaining the vehicles rather than minor differences between the individual vehicles. None of this would even be needed if the Sheppard East LRT wasn't shelved by Rob Ford because the changes would have been made already during the production run of the vehicles for Sheppard East. We have now become the launch customer which means we get the lovely benefit (if you can call it that) of being the guinea pigs.

Given that 503/504 still need more work to make them the same as the later vehicles I'd consider that incomplete, until then they're basically beta units. Functional beta units, but still beta (and therefore incomplete). I certainly agree that if the TTC hadn't cancelled Transit City then they'd have been the beta customer, and we wouldn't be, but that doesn't excuse Bombardier's delay. Timelines for delivery are supposed to include the beta testing phase.

At my work if we tell a customer we're delivering their product by X date and we only have a beta on X date, we don't get to say we met our timeline, even if the beta does most of what the customer wants.

You seem to fail to understand how the manufacturing process works for new products like these. These are complete real products. Not beta versions. Not incomplete versions. Fully assembled, fully functional vehicles. The only beta versions are Metrolinx's pilots. Metrolinx was supposed to be the beta customer long before even Shepard East was even supposed to be running. Rob Ford cancelled Shepard East, then Metrolinx took over the plan, then Metrolinx delayed the plan to beyond 2021, then Metrolinx refused to sign a single piece of paper related to their pilots for stupid reasons meaning our finished products ended up having to act like pilots even though they were never intended to. Our order wasn't supposed to be anywhere near the beta testing phase.