A brown paper bag just doesn’t buy what it used to.

Ottawa’s $2.1-billion light rail system, supposed to be finished by the end of this month, will not only miss its third completion deadline but is experiencing issues far more serious than city officials have led the public to believe, according to internal reports obtained by CBC.
 
The reports from the city’s rail operations show a litany of issues with the Confederation Line — the east-west system being built by the SNC Lavalin-led Rideau Transit Group — especially when it comes to the system’s ability to handle Ottawa winters.
 
“Vehicles are currently unreliable to the point that it has not been demonstrated that operations can be sustained during a winter weather event,” according to one report from last week.
 
The reports say that “panels are coming loose and breaking on LRVs [light-rail vehicles] due to snow building up on the vehicles,” and that snow and ice are “frequently causing the doors to freeze shut.”
 
Both brakes and bogies — the underframe of the rail car that holds the wheels — also freeze up if the vehicles “sit for any amount of time” outdoors during a snowfall.