The latest LRT update shows things are progressing normally

Regional Council briefly touched on the LRT update in their meeting, but little was discussed beyond the hope of a service date announcement.

"We are hoping, near the end of March, to actually be in a position to announce the start date for the service," Regional Councillor Tom Galloway said.

The last update for the ION service was set for spring 2019, though no specific date was given.

Otherwise, the LRT testing continues. There were still reliability issues in the service, but Galloway said it's on par for the course in testing.

"These are new vehicles. These are not like Toyotas coming off the assembly line in Cambridge. So there's a lot of tweaking that has to be done, so that's why people see all the testing going on. They identify some issues. They have to fix those issues," he said.

The Region now has 50 Bombardier staff members on hand to assist with the testing phase.

Currently, all vehicles are in the Region and have been installed with the GrandLinq On-board equipment.

The trains still need to be tested under various conditions to ensure all the equipment are properly communicating with each other.

After all that is done, they can move into their vehicle burn-in period which is a "commissioning process for insurance purposes" where they need to run for 600 kilometres to receive their Final Acceptance Certificates.

