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Originally Posted by Richard Eade
It is no surprise to me that we are having problems with the new Light Rail Vehicles (LRVs). How many of you would buy a brand-new car that was assembled from parts by the mechanic in the service garage down the street? Probably none of you (unless the price was phenomenal).
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That doesn't seem like a level comparison. We're talking about multi-million dollar vehicles. This isn't just some mechanic assembling parts, the manufacturer literally set up an assembly plant in the maintenance building. It isn't RTG or City of Ottawa workers performing the assembly, it's Alstom workers.
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In the procurement process, we wanted the LRVs to be assembled here in Ottawa. We were building a maintenance facility so we decided to use that. Yes, we deliberately chose to build the LRVs in our maintenance bays instead of having them built in a proper factory and then shipped here. It strikes me that the LINTs are a good reference point. They were manufactured in a factory and delivered to Ottawa. I don’t remember hearing that we had to fix five of the six before they worked properly.
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With this logic, why would anyone ever buy something from Ikea? Except here, it'd be like if Ikea did the assembly for you, on-site.
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I can just imagine what the Alstom guy said when he came to see what the problem was: “Yeah, this is ridiculous. Any future LRVs will be assembled in a proper facility. The Stage 2 LRVs are not going to be done here.” And, so, the announcement of the new Brampton facility taking on the Stage 2 LRV assembly.
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[citation needed] The Brampton facility was announced after Metrolinx signed the contract for their own order of vehicles. Brampton is closer to Hornell (where the parts are manufactured) and it makes sense to consolidate assembly for both regions. But that was an after-the-fact decision.
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The Brampton factory will have the capacity to finish 3 LRVs per month. In Ottawa, we have started 9 Stage 2 LRVs (No, they are not complete and tested!); but that has taken us how long? It surely takes a lot longer when the original LRVs need so much re-working. Remember, there are only so many resources available at the Belfast Yard. Once those resources can be dedicated to assembling the new LRVs, things should move a bit faster; which means that they are expecting to have 13 in production in November – so four more in four months.
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To be fair, they've had their hands kind of tied up with retrofitting the existing fleet. The fact that they have 9 done already is actually kind of surprising, seeing as they only really need to complete 4 of them this year
and the original ones aren't even done yet.
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Alstom didn’t need to have a factory in Canada, since there should have been no requirement for the LRVs to be assembled in Canada. That was simply a vanity addition.
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And officially, they didn't. The trains were manufactured in the US. Alstom also had(s) a facility in Quebec for building Montreal's Azurs, though I don't think that could have been repurposed in any useful way for Ottawa/Toronto.
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And, had the LRVs been produced in Europe, I doubt that there would have been a need for the design to have undergone such a radical reworking. We have been able to live with European designed and built trains from both Bombardier and Alstom for the Trillium Line. The main reason that this is an ‘all-new’ LRV design is because it needed to be built here; with our technology, tools, and supplies.
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Of course, the trains used on the Trillium Line have always been ill-suited for their task, even though they work fine, but that's another story. Also, they were a) tacked on to existing orders (the Talents) and b) an order of 6 vehicles, not 72 (+however many Metrolinx has ordered).
I'm sure it was up to the consortiums to select and propose a model of vehicle to be used in their bids, and I suspect that none of them submitted bids with off-the-shelf designs. Not a lot the city could do there if that was the case.
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As for Bombardier’s problems setting up a factory, that is an entirely different matter. Every new factory has teething-pains to work through. Once running properly, though, the factory will turn out reliably similar vehicles. We opted to have every LRV produced by hand in a maintenance bay.
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So how is this different than what happened in Ottawa? "Maintenance bay" is an unsubstantiated point. But besides, everything we know about the problems with the LRVs point to it being a design flaw, not an assembly flaw. Frankly, I'd say it's better that they were assembled here because we have everything we need to retrofit the trains right here. We don't have to deal with any hassle of shipping them back to the US for retrofits.
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