

Chris Fox, CP24.com





Streetcar service will remain suspended along Queen Street until Monday morning after the TTC found damage on 25 of its low-floor vehicles overnight.

The TTC made the decision to replace streetcars with buses on its 501 and 508 routes at around noon on Wednesday after first discovering damage to the emergency braking system on seven streetcars.

That same damage has now been found on a total of 25 streetcars but it remains unclear what actually caused it.

“In order to allow crews to complete their inspections and get as many cars as possible repaired, we are planning for bus replacement service to continue until Monday morning or until such time as the track is declared safe for operations and we make significant progress on repairs to the damaged streetcars,” the agency said in a statement sent to its board.

Overnight, TTC crews inspected the entire track along Queen Street, one kilometre at a time, but did not find what was responsible for the damage to the streetcars.

The TTC said it would send out three out-of-service streetcars on Thursday afternoon to run the length of the route again to verify its overnight finding.

“If we can clear Queen Street and all the diversionary routing we can put streetcars back on but our challenge of course is that we are now down 25 streetcars on a relatively fixed fleet,” TTC Spokesperson Stuart Green told CP24 on Thursday morning. “What we might have to do is bring in low floor streetcars from Carlton, put them on Queen and then put buses on Carlton. We are going to have some juggling to do even if we can service back on the 501 route.”

501 Queen. Buses are replacing streetcars along the entire route due to on going track inspections. Buses are unable to enter Humber Loop from the streetcar tracks and are diverting via Windermere and Lake Shore Blvd to route in both directions. — TTC Service Alerts (@TTCnotices) November 28, 2019

Green said that the inspection of the track along Queen Street has been “quite detailed” and has involved the use of small cameras placed in the wheelhouse of a test streetcar to look for any anomalies.

He said that while the damage to the streetcars can be corrected in a few hours with the replacement of a metal part, the TTC only has a limited number of the required parts on hand and will have to source additional materials from Bombardier.

In the meantime, he said that the TTC is “begging, borrowing and stealing” from other parts of the system to ensure that there is enough buses to supplement service along Queen Street.

There are currently about 80 buses serving the route.

“We have some spare buses that we have on standby for emergencies and things like subway closures but then we have to pull in buses from other routes and that is unsustainable for us, so we need to get these streetcars back in service,” Green said.

Green added that the damage sustained to the emergency braking system on the affected streetcars could have “absolutely caused a derailment” if not detected.

“It was absolutely a very real threat and that’s why we stopped service,” he said.

The agency says it will be reaching out to other LRT operators in North America to ask if they have encountered the same issue.

As well, the TTC says it is also engaging the services of two consulting companies with expertise in trail operations and in vehicle engineering to help in their assessment.