In the midst of the ongoing debate about the future of Light Rail Transit it Ottawa it can be easy to forget that we’ve now had LRT rolling through our city for nine years thanks to the O-Train “pilot project” launched along an old CP rail corridor in 2001.
That’s getting a little long in the tooth for a test run, which seems to be why the City has announced a 5-week haitus in service this summer so that “lifecycle maintenance” can be carried out to carriages and track. The shut-down starts this Monday, the 12th, and the train will be replaced with a special service for the duration.
As a pilot project running along a largely out-of-sight length of track with limited integration with the rest of the transit system, the O-Train has been derided as the “train to nowhere”. Yet when Carleton U is in session — and that is pretty much year around nowadays — the ridership is up around 10,000 per day, twice what the estimates projected.
The service has made its way into popular culture, as well. For example, the train has inspired a group of stout defenders aptly known as “Friends of the O-Train, with their own blog.
Photographers have been infatuated with the train; one of the most comprehensive collections is kept up by Steve Brandon, on Flickr. Spacing Ottawa’s Justin Van Leeuwen crosses the tracks every day, which has led to striking photos such as the one above this story and this winter-time image, which has also been published in Spacing Magazine.
The clang of the station bells has been sampled in techno music — check here for the You-tube version. And while we are looking at video, the end of the miserable transit strike of 2009 saw the first OC routes return not to the bus network, but to the reliable O-Train, whose rolling stock seemed to deal with inactivity better than the buses. There’s a sense of jubilation to how that morning was remembered in this video.
With the example of that strike shut-down fresh in our memory, it will be interesting to observe how the O-Train will be missed these next five weeks. Will we be eagerly awaiting its return, or will the replacement buses have become the new normal for many riders?