O-Train service down for second day after vandals cut signalling cable

O-Train service on the Trillium Line is down for a second day because of vandals who cut the train’s signalling cable early Tuesday morning, OC Transpo says.

The vandals also stole some cabling, making it likely they were after the copper found inside, director of transit operations Troy Charter said in a phone interview on Wednesday morning.

Charter said repair work to the wires started “almost immediately” and OC Transpo is now running “numerous and hours-worth of tests” to make sure it’s safe to power up the north-south train line again.

He declined to offer a revised time that train service would resume, noting the tests are taking “longer than anticipated.”

“Safety is paramount first, so we have to get through those tests,” Charter said. “They have to be completed successfully before we can return to service.”

OC Transpo is telling commuters to catch the 107 bus in the meantime, which runs parallel to the train route between Bayview and South Keys stations.

The transit service first reported Tuesday morning that a “technical issue” was to blame for the disrupted service and revised that to “vandalism” on Wednesday morning. There’s been no movement on the train route since approximately 7:30 a.m. Tuesday morning.

This is the second time signalling-communication cable on the Trillium Line – which controls the movement of the trains and powers the track switches remotely – has been cut and stolen; the first occurred in March 2017.

While he said he doesn’t know the value of the cabling that was stolen, Charter suggested Tuesday’s act of vandalism is the worst case OC Transpo has experienced on the O-Train to date.

“There has been minor vandalism over the years on the Trillium Line but nothing of this magnitude, other than the one other occurrence last year,” Charter said.

Charter said cutting that cable is no easy feat; it would’ve taken the thieves “considerable effort,” he noted.

“You need some tools to be able to cut through … and remove the cabling,” he said. “You’re looking at a hacksaw or an axe or something like that.”

“It’s not something that you can just walk up to and pull apart.”

Charter said Ottawa police were on scene Tuesday and are investigating the vandalism. He added OC Transpo is forwarding “all information” over to police.

In order to prevent this kind of vandalism from happening again, Charter said OC Transpo has been working to upgrade the signalling cable system, which should be completed by the end of this year.

“On the Trillium Line, up until this point, it’s been things like burying the cable and hardening it so it can’t be removed and the big one for us was getting rid of these overhead wires, these poles that go into signal boxes,” he said. “We’re also moving from copper cables, which is prone to that theft and vandalism, to a fibre-optic cable network which is different … there’s different options to protect that cable as well.”

Charter added the infrastructure of new light-rail lines in Ottawa, still under construction, will be “quite different” from that of Trillium Line.

“It’ll further enhance the reliability moving forward and reduce the potential for this type of vandalism,” he said.