After a series of delays, the City of Edmonton announced Friday that the often-delayed LRT line extension to Macewan University and NAIT would open in time for the coming school year.
City of Edmonton Transportation Services Manager Dorian Wandzura announced Friday that the Metro LRT Line extension would open, on an interim basis, on September 6.
The line will open using ‘line of sight’ operations – what the City called a “railway industry mode of operation”, meaning the trains will have to run with a speed restriction to allow operators to stop the train within half the range of their vision.
As a result, Metro LRT Line trains will not exceed 25 kilometres per hour between Macewan and NAIT – its expected trains will run every 15 minutes on the line at this time.
“While not as fast as we would like, [it is] still faster than the express bus we have today,” Wandzura said.
Officials said the City is still working on full implementation that will remove the operating restriction and allow the trains to run at about twice that speed – at that point, it’s estimated the trains will run every 10 minutes.
It’s not clear when the line will be fully up and running.
“Full implementation looks like every train running between Century Park and Clareview, and the NAIT train running between Health Sciences, in between those up to NAIT,” Wandzura said. “That’s what full service looks like, that’s what the City bought and paid for, and that’s what we expect to get.”
Friday’s announcement came two weeks after the City announced a safety audit had been launched into the signaling system for the line.
Since July 31, the City worked with an independent signal engineering consultant to come up with a solution to allow the line to operate.
With files from Joshua Skurnik
