Ottawa Ontario - Ottawa's long-awaited Trillium Line LRT will open for business on Monday, 6 Jan 2025.
 
The train will open in phases, beginning with weekday service and gradually increasing to daily service over a number of weeks.
 
Transit General Manager Renee Amilcar announced the opening at a technical briefing for councillors and the media at city hall on 6 Dec 2024.
 
The announcement marked "a milestone we have all been looking forward to," she said.
 
"I'm proud of the work we have done and I am confident in the system. The benefits of this extension will be felt across our city, transforming the way that people move and making our transit system more reliable," Amilcar said.
 
The Stage 2 extension of the O-train to the south provides service on Line 2 between Bayview Station and Limebank Station in the city's south end and includes a spur, Line 4, between South Keys and the Ottawa airport.
 
All told, Lines 2 and 4 add 19 kilometres of new track and 12 stations, eight of them new, to Ottawa's light-rail network.
 
In the first phase of service, trains will run Monday to Friday from 06:00 to midnight for a minimum of two weeks.
 
If all goes well, the second phase will add Saturday service.
 
After another two weeks at minimum, the line will open fully with trains seven days a week.
 
Beginning operations in winter is unusual for any LRT system, Amilcar said, and shutting down on weekends will give more time to do maintenance and fix any issues that might crop up in the early days of running.
 
Launching in phases was one of the lessons learned from the troubled opening of the Confederation Line in 2019, she said.
 
Parallel bus service will run alongside the route until OC Transpo is certain it's no longer needed, Amilcar said.
 
"Even with all these preparations and lessons learned, we know there will be service disruptions along this line. That's the reality of operating any transit system," she cautioned.
 
Unlike the twin tracks of the Confederation Line, the Trillium Line has long stretches of single track and if a train breaks down there, there is no way to bypass it.
 
In April, OC Transpo will launch its New Ways to Bus program, which overhauls more than 100 bus routes in conjunction with the Trillium Line service.
 
The start of revenue service is more than two years behind its original schedule, a delay the city says is mostly due to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
"I want to thank council and the residents of Ottawa for your patience through this project," Amilcar said.
 
The Trillium Line will provide service to Carleton University students, who have been without LRT service since the previous O-Train track was shut down in the spring of 2020.
 
The start date coincides with the beginning of classes after the Christmas break.
 
"It is good news. I'm glad it's going to be open in time for those students to return at Carleton U. I think a lot of us had hoped it would be something we could explore over the Christmas holidays, but clearly OC Transpo is not rushing it. I can wait," Kitchissippi Ward Coun. Jeff Leiper said.
 
Unlike the electric trains that run on the east-west Confederation Line, the Trillium Line will have diesel trains, which will run every 12 minutes and can carry up to 600 passengers, with 300 in each of their two cars.
 
OC Transpo says the service will increase the capacity of the old O-Train by 60 percent and cut 15 minutes off the time to travel to downtown Ottawa by bus.
 
Builder TransitNEXT completed a 14 day trial run in October, scoring a reliability rating of 99.5 percent in a rolling average of on-time performance over the testing period.
 
The city and an independent reviewer agreed that TransitNEXT had achieved "substantial completion" of the project on 26 Nov 2024.
 
That was followed by an approval of the operating licence by federal regulators, a Certificate of Fitness by the Canadian Transportation Agency, and the Railway Operation Certificates from Transport Canada.
 
Both of those have now been received, said Richard Holder, the city's Director of Rail Construction.
 
Amilcar inherited the second stage of the LRT construction when she was hired by the city in 2019.
 
When asked in October how she felt as the Trillium Line neared completion, Amilcar said she remained "focused."
 
She was asked again Friday by reporters how she was feeling and was equally direct.
 
"My new word now is rational, factual. I don't care about opinion. I'm working with experts. This is a technical thing. We need technical decisions, not opinion, not nice-to-have. I'm not here to please people, I'm here to deliver good service," she said.
 
Blair Crawford.