The company that makes the signaling system that Edmonton’s Metro Line LRT runs on says a failure in the system that caused the line to be shut down last Friday morning is “extremely rare”.
Edmonton transit shut down the line for about four hours on February 8 because of the issues, running buses between the Churchill and NAIT stations.
“You’d see gate arms coming up and down sporadically, so driver behaviour and pedestrian behaviour might have been impacted,” said ETS Engineering and Maintenance Director Craig McKeown told CTV News on Friday.
In a written statement, Thales, which makes the signaling system says they apologize to passengers for the difficulties on a very cold day.
“Preliminary investigation points to the malfunction of third-party equipment that is part of the CBTC system. This type of disruption is unacceptable to Thales and we are working diligently with ETS to determine the root cause of this occurrence.”
The city has issued Thales a deadline to correct the ongoing issues with the system, and could put an end to the $55-million contract with the company is the issues continue.
Thales says they continue to exceed expectations.
“While Friday’s event was frustrating and disruptive, the reliability of the Metro Line has been exceptional over the past 14 months, exceeding Thales’ contract obligations of 99.9%, measuring delays of greater than five minutes.”
