The O-Train Confederation Line is referred to as a light rail system, and I guess it is within the common use of the term. But I've been wondering if it's actually a 'light rail' / subway / streetcar hybrid - even wikipedia notes that it's difficult to pin down an exact definition of what constitutes a light rail system. That is certainly true of the Confederation Line.
On the 'light rail' side of things, The Confederation Line has many segments as per the tight definition in Wikipedia: light rail operates primarily along exclusive rights-of-way and uses either individual tramcars or multiple units coupled to form a train that is lower capacity and lower speed than a long heavy-rail passenger train or metro system. But, there's a subway side too: there's 2.5 km of underground track downtown servicing the equally underground Lyon, Parliament, and Rideau stations.
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| The last line refers to the Confederation trains as streetcars: snapped 19 Sept '19 |
And you may recall from an earlier post that the trains themselves, the Alstom Citadis Spirits, are basically very large streetcars, even though they aren't running on the streets of Ottawa. Interestingly, even Alstom's own site refers to the cars used on the Confederation Line as streetcars.
Does any of this make any difference to day-to-day operations? Likely not. Definitions don't matter much when it comes to designing and building a railway. It's the requirements and costs and such things that need to be paid attention to.
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