ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[tomh009]

All aerospace companies -- regardless of the country -- receive subsidies, tax breaks and/or other government support. But that's irrelevant to the question of the root causes of the delay. Which we really don't know yet.

You're probably right but wouldn't it be nice if those "subsidies" resulted in better production instead of unreasonable delays and cancelled contracts.

Vast majority of BBD's subsidies have been for their aerospace division.

Personally I don't agree with the subsidies but everyone else doing it so to stay competitive, Canada does it, too. It's kind of like competing against athletes that do doping, it's hard to stay clean and still be competitive.

[Bob_McBob]

It is amazing how the timeline has shifted over the years.

I wouldn't read into that too much. The region started targeting 2017 as soon as the route was actually approved. "Mid 2017" in that last document was just a general estimate because the project agreement wasn't signed yet. The project agreement calls for substantial completion at the end of July 2017 with service to begin later in the year, fulfilling the original 2017 target set back in 2011.

[MacBerry]

In fairness, they're at the whim of CP or CN (whoever it is - I don't follow freight!) picking it up whenever they get around to it.  Hopefully it won't be too much longer to get here.

There may be other factors as to why they don't really need them here any quicker.  ie, my last two pictures above.

Please stop defending Bombardier and their lies and delays Oh it's Cn/CPs fault, please ... one and a half years late in deliveries and lateness growing ...

Canada's worst corporation BOMBARDIER. 

They have screwed their own reputation and the people of Ontario and Waterloo Region are their victims, they also have used taxpayer subsidies to enrich senior management.

[sevenman]

In fairness, they're at the whim of CP or CN (whoever it is - I don't follow freight!) picking it up whenever they get around to it.  Hopefully it won't be too much longer to get here.

There may be other factors as to why they don't really need them here any quicker.  ie, my last two pictures above.

Please stop defending Bombardier and their lies and delays Oh it's Cn/CPs fault, please ... one and a half years late in deliveries and lateness growing ...

Canada's worst corporation BOMBARDIER. 

They have screwed their own reputation and the people of Ontario and Waterloo Region are their victims, they also have used taxpayer subsidies to enrich senior management.

Exactly Mac,

The last portion of your post is the most frustrating.  $32 million in bonuses for six, that's right SIX executives.

[Canard]

What can I say?

I guess I have Stockholm Syndrome. I don't want this to end.

[Rainrider22]

In fairness, they're at the whim of CP or CN (whoever it is - I don't follow freight!) picking it up whenever they get around to it.  Hopefully it won't be too much longer to get here.

There may be other factors as to why they don't really need them here any quicker.  ie, my last two pictures above.

Please stop defending Bombardier and their lies and delays Oh it's Cn/CPs fault, please ... one and a half years late in deliveries and lateness growing ...

Canada's worst corporation BOMBARDIER. 

They have screwed their own reputation and the people of Ontario and Waterloo Region are their victims, they also have used taxpayer subsidies to enrich senior management.

Agreed. How the shareholders have not asked for the heads of leaders of this corporation is unbelievable. What other company would ever get away with this. I suspect the end of the company is nearing which will make matters worse for us. No technical support or parts for service.

[Canard]

LOL! You make it sound like ours and Toronto's orders are the only ones Bombardier has ever done around the entire world.

They are doing just fine. A little behind on our project, yes - but Kingston has handed a poorly-managed project from another plant and have turned it around incredibly rapidly. Historically, Kingston has delivered on every single project in their entire history successfully.

[timio]

As it has been stated before, there isn't one specific party to blame for this. Multiple groups had a role in getting us to where we are today, both productively and not so much.

Hindsight bias aside, it is what it is. I'm sure there's negotiations in the background to figure out compensation for delays, but we'll see more action on the line soon... We can hope.

[Rainrider22]

LOL!  You make it sound like ours and Toronto's orders are the only ones Bombardier has ever done around the entire world.

They are doing just fine.  A little behind on our project, yes - but Kingston has handed a poorly-managed project from another plant and have turned it around incredibly rapidly.  Historically, Kingston has delivered on every single project in their entire history successfully.

Canard. Why are you laughing at my response. You are the first person on here to get upset if someone is even a little bit disrespectful in your view.  

May I remind you that New York city just shut bombardier out. Add Toronto et al.  You can laugh at me if you want but if this compnay docent get serious about how is manages itself, it's days are numbered . I truly hope I am wrong because I want a Canadian company to suceed. But right now. The reality is they are incompetent.  Put your bias a side and look at their unproven results.

[tomh009]

Agreed. How the shareholders have not asked for the heads of leaders of this corporation is unbelievable.

Bombardier is controlled by the Beaudoin family, which owns a majority of voting shares, and thus can also control the board appointments. So they are unlikely to ask for their own heads. And like every private corporation, the board determines executive pay. BBD says the management team exceeded their pre-defined performance targets in 2017 to earn the bonuses.

The CEO is Alain Bellemare, who joined the company in 2015 from UTC, and whose focus in the first few years has been primarily to salvage the situation in the aerospace division (which he has been able to stabilize, finally with the joint venture with Airbus). The transportation division is led by Laurent Troger (ex Alstom), who has been in the role for a little over two years.

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.

[KevinL]

I think a lot of the Bombardier hate is the human tendency to seek a simple answer, a single villain in a narrative. We keep hearing bad news surrounding them, ergo they take all the blame.

Are they saints? Absolutely not. They're a complex organization run by fallible humans, like any other, and they've had a particular run of poor results lately. I neither absolve them from blame - nor place all of it at their feet.

[tomh009]

I think a lot of the Bombardier hate is the human tendency to seek a simple answer, a single villain in a narrative. We keep hearing bad news surrounding them, ergo they take all the blame.

Are they saints? Absolutely not. They're a complex organization run by fallible humans, like any other, and they've had a particular run of poor results lately. I neither absolve them from blame - nor place all of it at their feet.

Indeed. People tend to love black-and-white answers, wrong and right, good and evil. But in real life the world is full of shades of grey, and the answers are rarely fully clear-cut.

[Canard]

The last two three posts are the best ones in pages of negative, hateful drivel.  Thank you Kevin and Tom.

I have never, ever understood the human desire to "hate" something so passionately.

[ijmorlan]

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.

[ijmorlan]

Further to the previous, there is a page which lists all of Toronto’s new streetcars:

https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/Toronto_..._4400-4603

The dates provided there indicate that new cars enter service well under a month after delivery. So this says that if the car delivery is the critical path, we can open our system complete with spares in July or August of this year, less than one month after the last delivery according to the current schedule. Any later opening than that is probably on GrandLinq alone, unless there is an issue with the in-car systems integration with the wayside equipment, which conceivably could still implicate Bombardier.