Light Rail Vehicles - LRT, ICTS, Monorail, and more

[Canard]

Is ICTS a light rail system? Google tells me that it's complicated.

ICTS is the name given to the concept developed by UTDC in the 80's.  It was a system intended to bridge the gap between Light Rail/Streetcars and full Metro/Subway systems (call it a "mini-metro" or "pre-metro", if you like).  UTDC was owned by the Province and in France at the same time MATRA was developing VAL, so the two were in direct competition with one another.  Both used small, lightweight vehicles running in small trains at high frequency to achieve a reasonable capacity.

While VAL uses rubber tires and conventional electric motors, ICTS uses a Linear Induction Motor which has no moving parts, and produces direct thrust without any friction or contact.  Because the coil on the train (1 mounted in each bogie) interacts directly with the passive reaction rail (an aluminium plate) on the track, traction loss is impossible.  The wheels can therefore be much smaller, the floor height is lower, and the vehicles and tunnels can all be smaller.

The design concept was even more advanced and introduced steerable trucks, intended to allow the cars to navigate very tight turns - typically the types of curve radii that Light Rail/Streetcars can do.  In practice, there were problems with a very tight radius turn in Scarborough (the turnaround loop at Kennedy) which had actually been built already when the line was intended to be serviced by CLRV's... and there the turnaround loop is no longer used and a switch was added, so the trains just back out the way they came.

While the Scarborough rt is often seen by many as a failure and the TTC is doing everything in its power to get rid of it, Vancouver's Skytrain (the second installation) is very successful, and is the longest automated system in the world.

One advantage I can think of is if you want to have a surface section - or if you're expanding a system with surface routes - this vehicle can have a pantograph and a ground pickup, and be able to use either.

I think some tram-trains in Europe do this, in fact.

None that I'm aware of. The Eurostar (Class 373 HSR) is the only system like this I've heard of, where there's a third-rail pickup shoe for operation inside some tunnels or stations within London.