04-15-2018, 11:07 AM
(04-15-2018, 10:21 AM)tomh009 Wrote: Most of the problems with our trains and the Metrolinx order date back to well before Bellemare and Troger took leadership positions. Arguably they have made significant improvements in that time, although I don't follow the transportation side of the company very closely.
Yes, my sense is that the current leadership of Bombardier is doing pretty well at cleaning up the mess created by the previous leadership. As Canard has pointed out, once production of our LRVs was moved to Kingston, it moved along pretty smoothly. At this point I think the bigger issue is with slow work by GrandLinq. I think GrandLinq may have eased off in the knowledge that vehicles would not be ready according to the original schedule. Given that we’re seeing track rework and the like 8 months after the system should have opened, and 16 months after the vehicles were supposed to be on property, and 14 months after the first vehicle was on property and could have been towed around to verify geometry, it’s clear to me that they aren’t treating this with appropriate urgency.
While it is true that not all the vehicles are here yet, it must be possible to fully commission the system with fewer vehicles. Imagine that we only needed 30 minute headways. Then we would need 4-5 vehicles total, and we would as of the next delivery have everything we need to open. So GrandLinq should be completing commissioning of the system forthwith, including burn-in and everything, and just waiting for enough more vehicles to arrive to open with decent service. As each new vehicle arrives it obviously needs to be commissioned, but this is essentially just adding more vehicles to an already-operational system, which only needs to take a few days to a couple of weeks per vehicle (at least, I believe that is what the Toronto streetcar system is doing). So any talk of vehicles not being available at this point is pretty much just covering for a tardy commissioning process.