29 Replies to “I Was Promised The Trains Would Run On Time”

  1. Trains were invented in England in 1812.. Wrap your head around that.. Over 200 years and they still manage to FAIL..

  2. But, but, but… the trains will run on time, Kate.

    To keep that promise the trains will only be operated on odd-numbered days, excluding holidays and weekends, and there will be an extra half-hour between stops.

    See? It can be done. The bureaucrats are already back in the break room getting coffee and planning how they will spend their bonuses.

  3. “If they’re only running half at normal capacity, the maintenance only has to be done half as often because each train is only doing half as many kilometres in a period of several months,” David Jeanes said Sunday.
    Yep, even with new hubs they have to change all of them every 40k miles. $$$$
    Love this:
    “Top of line lubrication is a plan to put a slippery product on the top of the rails each time a train passes over it, to reduce friction and wear and tear on the wheels and axles. This system will be placed on curves and is expected by the end of the year.
    Followed by this:
    “”We will always, always put safety first,” Amilcar said.”
    So, what happens when the train needs to slow or even, God forbid, stop on the greased curve???!!!
    Heh…. yeah.
    BTW be on the lookout for floor sagging at the doors on the overloaded single cars preventing the doors from opening and/or closing. 😉

  4. Now you know why Himbo Watson doesn’t dare show his face in Ottawa anymore. Or the former City Manager. Or about half of city Councillors that didn’t run last October. Or all the useless citizen volunteers on the advisory committee summarily dismissed by Ottawa’s new mayor. People who live in Ottawa know exactly who’s to blame for this.

    At this point, probably the cheapest thing to do is simply fill in the tunnel. Call it the Himbo Bunker. The city already has the Diefenbunker.

    1. The whole point of the LRT was to replace the HUNDREDS of busses travelling through the downtown core.

      A couple of billion dollars later, it appears like the city is going back to that old system.

  5. From the CBC…
    “Declercq testified there were other issues with how its trains came together. The computer control system for the trains automatically controls acceleration and deceleration, and was provided by a different company.”
    Wonder if it has positraction and ABS breaking?
    “Paging Miss Mona-Lisa Vito (or anyone with any common sense for that matter).”

  7. Have they found a way to blame this on the Truckers Strike?

    Because the only way this system could fail so spectacularly is if it was sabotaged by evil external forces that prevented the brave government workers from getting it all right.

  8. Confederation is not working….think we already knew that. Did not need Ottawa to emphasise it.

  9. Travelling in Ottawa by car was a shitshow before the OLRT.
    The train, brought to the citizens by anti-car center town nutjobs, has now made it worse to drive.
    And they’ve narrowed roads and made some intersections into confuse-a-cat with bike lanes that go up on sidewalks, but are separate from pedestrians – sort of – and painted green because it doesn’t snow in Ottawa…
    There is a long-term plan that nobody has read that basically sodomizes the travel of suburban residents in the not-too-distant-future.
    Meanwhile the feds have closed a portion of a route downtown along the canal claiming it is a pedestrian thing and they have some zealots bleating that its great but its really because the City told the feds to F-off when the arseholes wanted Wellington (Freedom Convoy) Street closed permanently.
    So lots of pain here that SDA readers can enjoy for years to come.

    1. You must be living here! You pretty much nailed this city’s dysfunctionality. I can’t think of anything else to add to that.

      Personally, I’m looking forward to NOT sharing in that pain, but enjoy the schadenfreude instead.

    2. You just described … anti-car … San Francisco. A complete shit show for automobiles … and the WORST is the freeway exits that empty into ONE lane of a city street that is pocked with potholes,so drivers have to exit the freeway at 2mph. Yes … you can imagine how congested this makes the freeways surrounding San Francisco … backed up for miles.

  10. I used to live in “Rome on the Rideau” 20 years ago. It was a bureaucratic shit hole then. It only got worse.

  11. During the Great Depression automobiles were sometimes towed around by horses because gasoline was unaffordable or unavailable. These conveyances were called Bennett Buggies as a swipe at the Prime Minister, R.B. Bennett, who was pretty well blameless for the sad state of economic affairs.

    But in Ottawa, we now have a catastrophe of a transportation system and the man responsible for the mess suffers no slings or arrows from his lapping and loving press … and that includes the Richardson and the rest of the CTV news crew.

    I have yet to see a cartoon of ex-mayor Jim Waaaatson perched on the nose of a train being towed along by a team of donkeys with the caption “Watson Wagon”.

  12. The NO-Train was supposed to replace busses, now the busses will continue to run.

  13. Everything the climate zealots touch turns to bovine excrement, thus adding to glow ball wormening.

  14. The large majority of riders on Ottawa’s light rail system were supposed to be federal public servants going to and from work. Most, however, are still “working” from home and go to the office at most one or two days a week. So even if the light rail system was working at full capacity, there would be relatively few riders.

    And by the way, the reason the public servants are not going to the office five days a week is that the Liberals are afraid to order them to do so because they might lose the votes of many of those public servants.

    1. Exactly right MJ.

      Ottawa… where they can order you to get an injection, or lose your job. But they cannot order you to return to work, or lose your job.

  15. Funny, when I heard that Ottawa was going to get an LRT, I assumed that they (the folks spending money and deciding which systems to purchase) would talk to other Canadian cities that run LRTs. You know like when you’re looking to buy a new car, you do your research then talk to people who have the same or similar vehicles to find out how well they perform? I know that Edmonton has been running an LRT since the early 90s with extreme cold temperatures down to -35ºC (and the trains still keep running). Imagine my surprise when the Ottawa LRT, purchased almost forty years later shut down because of “extreme” cold (it went down to -15ºC). Apparently, they didn’t speak to any Canadian city that runs a similar system in extremely cold temperatures (no Toronto doesn’t count because their definition of “cold” is 5ºC to -10ºC). Thus, proving that municipal purchasers (and their research teams) are far less intelligent than your average consumer when purchasing a new vehicle. However, I wonder who got money deposited into offshore numbered Swiss/Turks&Caicos/Bahamian bank accounts and how much did each individual receive.

  16. I’ve ridden bullet trains across Japan 240Km/h, clean and efficient, complete with food & drink service with friendly staff.

    The average North American simply doesn’t understand that the rest of the world has already surpassed or will soon surpass our declining quality of civilization.

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