LRT officials said Tuesday the full 12.5\u002Dkilometre LRT line might not be running until Friday as workers repair storm damage, but they could face bigger questions about the premature breakdowns of wheel components on the Alstom Citadis Spirit trains.
Mario Guerra, the CEO of Rideau Transit Maintenance , said during a press briefing his “best estimate” was that the LRT system would be fully operational by Friday as workers replace about 900 metres of overhead wire damaged by a lightning strike on Sunday night between Lees and uOttawa stations.
The train will require a full inspection at the maintenance facility and officials hoped to send another train to tow it on Tuesday night. RTM cleared debris on the other track to get trains to the western leg of the railway. Guerra said RTM will check to make sure the LRT system responded appropriately to the power loss, but he said “there’s not much we can do” about a lightning strike.
Guerra said RTM decided to pull any vehicle with over 175,000 kilometres of service for inspections. The hubs will be replaced with new ones and the old hubs will go through non-destructive testing, he said. In total, RTM is changing hubs on four axles per vehicle. Guerra estimated that two vehicles per day could be processed.Article content
RTM and the city have said the latest wheel problem isn’t linked to the wheel bearing assembly breakdown in the August 2021 derailment near Tunney’s Pasture Station. “It does worry me,” Guerra said. “We obviously have experienced a couple of incidents with the axles now, so we need to get to the bottom of it. We’re being overly cautious, as cautious as we can be, because safety is paramount here, but we need to get to the bottom of the root cause so we can put this behind us and put some long-term mitigations in place.”Transpo general manager Renée Amilcar said the root-cause analysis of the latest wheel problem will lead to a final resolution.
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