News   Jul 12, 2024
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Ottawa Transit Developments

Ottawa winters and its original light rail system.
Fascinating footage.
nickster182
nickster182

This would have been after the big ice and snow storm of Dec 27-30th 1942 that brought about an inch of freezing rain to Ottawa followed by a foot of snow. It then got quite cold after that which froze the ice solid onto trees, power lines and rail lines. That's why they needed pick axes to get through it. Great video of how we dealt with winter's worst back in our yesteryear!
3 years ago
And a presage gone wrong:
David Markos
David Markos

That is beautiful! I'm also glad that we don't have to put up with storms like this nowadays
3 years ago
-: Link above
 
They've added a virtual tour of Blair station now. Blair is sort of an oddball, as it leaves large parts of the original station intact, yet now abandoned and inaccessible to the public.

 
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The 12 day handover test is now go, if this goes well the city will get the keys to the system by the end of May
The 12 day test did not appear to begin today (I guess they only really found out today). Will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.
 
The 12 day test did not appear to begin today (I guess they only really found out today). Will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.

of course another snag when the auditor agreed with the city that additional work is required before the test can start. But overall timelines haven't changed, so *soon*
 
I'm a little late to the discussion, but the whole debate about LRVs being appropriate for cold winters seems a little silly to me. There are quite a few cities with colder winters than Ottawa (not just colder overall, but with colder winters) that have streetcars and LRT systems. Like Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Or Vladivostok, Russia. Or Changchun, China. Central Asia is a place of temperature extremes that rival any Canadian city.
 
I'm a little late to the discussion, but the whole debate about LRVs being appropriate for cold winters seems a little silly to me. There are quite a few cities with colder winters than Ottawa (not just colder overall, but with colder winters) that have streetcars and LRT systems. Like Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Or Vladivostok, Russia. Or Changchun, China. Central Asia is a place of temperature extremes that rival any Canadian city.

I'm sure right here at home, Edmonton has colder winters than Ottawa and it's LRT network is still being rapidly expanded out.
 
^It's not "LRT winter able" or not. It's the design. In all fairness, in this case, it was in reference to the Alstom model supplied, variations of which are indeed in colder and snowier cities than Ottawa.
 
^It's not "LRT winter able" or not. It's the design. In all fairness, in this case, it was in reference to the Alstom model supplied, variations of which are indeed in colder and snowier cities than Ottawa.

Actually the whole winter thing really had to do a lot with track clearing. They blithely assumed that the trains could basically be sent out after 30cm snowfalls with no track preparation. These aren't like mainline trains, they don't have their own snowplow built in. Once the track is cleared, the frequency of trains is enough to keep it clear, but if you leave them out in the middle of a snowstorm over night, I'm simply shocked, shocked that they get stuck the next morning.

As for the door jam problem, apparently that's been happening long after the snow melted, Alstom has to fix that up before handover.
 
These aren't like mainline trains, they don't have their own snowplow built in.
They do, they're just mounted underneath the train instead of in front.
IIRC, they weren't running trains frequently enough (testing hadn't ramped up nearly as much at that point) and ended up being unprepared to clear all the snow that had fallen afterwards.
 

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