Ottawa residents can start riding the light-rail trains on the long-delayed Confederation Line on Sept. 14, the mayor of Ottawa announced on Friday.

Mayor Jim Watson revealed the LRT’s launch date during a briefing at city hall, exactly 456 days after the $2.1-billion LRT system was originally supposed to be delivered to the city.

The CEO of the Rideau Transit Group (RTG), the builder of the east-west Stage 1 LRT, symbolically handed over the 12.5-kilometre Confederation Line to the municipality on Friday with the presentation of a framed key to city officials.

RTG, though, is still in the process of fully turning over the system and the city expects that process to be complete by the end of next week, said Michael Morgan, director of the city’s rail construction program.

Once that’s happened, RTG – a private consortium of Canadian and international companies – will receive a final payment of about $202 million, according to the city.

The Confederation Line successfully completed a critical trial run test earlier this week, Morgan said.

The contractually obligated trial run began on July 29 and to pass, the LRT system had to run for 12 consecutive days mimicking the schedule and service that OC Transpo has planned for the train.

Senior transportation staff said earlier this summer that a major problem would trigger a restart of the 12-day run, but they subsequently remained tight-lipped about how the test was going during the trial period.

John Manconi, head of OC Transpo, has said for months the city would need up to four weeks to prepare the train and its 13 stations for launch day after taking control of the LRT system.

RTG missed four official handover dates before successfully passing the trial run: May 24, 2018, Nov. 2, 2018, Mar. 31, 2019 and Aug. 16, 2019.

An affiliate of RTG, Rideau Transit Maintenance, is responsible for maintaining the Confederation Line until 2038.

More to come

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