It was a tense and very cold evening for SkyTrain passengers stranded on a Canada Line train for three hours on Monday night.
The train became stuck between the Aberdeen and Lansdowne stations at about 8:20 p.m, halting all service between Bridgeport and YVR stations.
“It works 99 per cent of the time but it didn’t work last night,” TransLink spokesperson Chris Bryan said Tuesday.
Between 50 and 60 people were stuck on board the train when it lost power.
“Well, we’ve got things in place that usually work 99.99 per cent of the time,” Bryan added. “The glycol is out there and clearing it off and we are inspecting them as well but we’re sort of limited in what we can do. It was a localized situation, which unfortunately affected a lot of people.”
“We’re obviously very apologetic to those folks. It was not a very pleasant evening for them.”
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There were two failed rescue attempts, one using a rescue train that became stuck, and a second using another train trying to grab the rescue train and the stuck one but it didn’t have enough power.
Passenger Masooda Shahi told Global News, “There was a rescue train, after maybe an hour, right behind us. That was the time the train was moving back and forth, like maybe 10 metres, and that also got stuck.”
Technicians managed to recover the stuck rescue train and tried coupling it with the first train, but there wasn’t enough power to haul both.
Finally, after nearly three hours, customers got out of their train and walked across the guide way to one on the opposite track.
TransLink says customers were not evacuated to the opposite guide way right away, as it was not safe to lead them along the elevated guide way in the hazardous weather conditions.
“We extend a sincere apology to these customers,” TransLink spokesperson Jill Drews said in an email on Tuesday.
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