KINGSTON — Via Rail’s much-hyped new Renaissance trains got their first taste of winter this week and they don’t appear to like it, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported.
The Crown corporation’s new British-built trains, which were unveiled to much fanfare as representing the rebirth of passenger rail in Canada, suffered repeated malfunctions this week as the temperature dipped below -10 C for the first time.
On Monday and Tuesday at least two trains were at least a half-hour late arriving at Toronto’s Union Station because doors froze shut or wouldn’t open, problems a Canadian train expert says Via should have seen coming. Via bought the 139 Alstom cars from a British company that bought them for the English Channel tunnel but never used them. The price tag was $125 million.
A Via spokesman confirmed yesterday that the trains were having difficulty in the cold.
“It’s weather-related and it’s only a problem that started showing itself when the cold weather set in,” said Malcolm Andrews, a Via public affairs officer. “It didn’t show up in the testing we did in the late fall.”
The doors can be opened manually by train crews when the automatic system fails but that takes time and delays the trains.
Yesterday, the 5:45 a.m. train from Kingston to Toronto stopped without warning for about 20 minutes in Oshawa. Angry passengers on the sold-out train complained that the problem with the doors had happened before and made cellphone calls to people in Toronto to put off their morning meetings.
The trains are made up of older cars, which are kept overnight in Kingston, and the European cars, which are brought in overnight.
The commuter trains are assembled from both sets of cars in Kingston for the early-morning run that begins here. No problems have been reported with the older cars.
The reported problems come as no surprise to Glen Fisher, a train broker and former Canadian Pacific engineer who has been critical of Via’s decision to buy the trains.
“These trains were built for use in England, in the Chunnel,” he said. “It doesn’t get that cold in England.” Although Via claims the trains were cold-weather tested in Austria, Fisher said those tests were “not realistic” for predicting how the trains would do in Canada.
Every piece of rolling stock used in this country should be run and evaluated through an entire winter before its performance can be accurately assessed, he said.
“Traditionally, commuter trains have to go through one winter cycle because the door gaskets will freeze and not be flexible or the snow gets in the door tracks and either blocks them open or freezes them shut,” he said.
“You wind up having to install strip heaters or other devices to solve the problem. This has all happened before.” Andrews said Via engineers are looking at placing small heaters near the doors to try to solve the problem. Only a fraction of the 139 cars are in service, with the rest being refitted by Bombardier.
The cars have previously been condemned as inaccessible by groups representing the disabled, who took Via to the federal transport regulator to try to 0block their use in Canada. Fisher has argued the trains don’t meet Canadian safety standards, even with heavy modifications, and said stuck doors are the least of their problems. The trains are lighter than conventional trains and would offer passengers less protection in an accident.
“If they have a derailment, it’s going to be a nightmare,” he said. “And it’s not a question of if, but when.”
Winter woes plagued Via six years ago when it tested a Danish-built train known as the IC3 Flexliner on commuter routes, including the Ottawa-Kingston-Toronto run. The trains did not consistently trigger barriers at automatic crossings, and when that problem was fixed, Via discovered the European trains were too light to push through heavy Canadian snowdrifts.