Are any model railroaders working on Ottawa's Woe-Train?

Back in the fall of 2019 I had plans to write extensively about Ottawa's then brand new Light Rail Transit system, the OTrain. I even got press credentials to ride on the inaugural run.

Although that press event was pulled off without a hitch as they say, from then on it was one LRT problem after another right up until now. The problems kept coming so fast and were so serious that I stopped writing about the LRT because I didn't want the blog to become dominated by that terrible system. 

If you want to read about the LRT's entire tale of woe, Sarah Trick of TVO wrote an excellent summary, Ottawa's colossal LRT debacle: A brief-ish history, and there's an equally good one by Brett Popplewell at The Walrus, Ottawa's Transit Gong Show, from February of this year. If you think you can stomach all the details, you can find the final report of the public inquiry here.

So, why am I writing about the LRT today? Well, I had a gallows humour chuckle at the most recent problem noted in the CBC report, Axle bearings on Ottawa LRT might need to be redesigned. It seems like this might be the result of certain too sharp curves that were laid too flat (track issues were reported in, LRT inquiry commissioner still concerned about wheel and track problems). Are there any model railroaders on their team? Any model railroader with the slightest experience has learned - usually the hard way - that you can't run long trains with long cars on tight radius track. You get binding and jamming and derailments. And you need generous easements too. Often the only way to improve operations and resolve frustrations is to rip up the track and start fresh, maybe with a new layout - easy for a model railroad, impossible for the real thing.

If you're a longtime reader here you may recall I wrote about a fictional HO-scale layout of the entire transit system of New Toronto in my 2013 pulp novella, Light Ray Blues. It was run by the University of New Toronto's Lone Trainmen, and you can read about it here. That fictional layout's purpose was to physically simulate operations and root out potential problems like the ones we're seeing with Ottawa's LRT. If anyone from the LRT is reading this, I can give you the number of the Lone Trainmen :-)