THALES DEFENDS ITSELF
City bears some responsibility for Metro Line LRT delays, VP says
Thales Canada had three major challenges on the Metro LRT Line but only two were technical, a senior official said Friday during one of the first times the company has talked publicly about its contract in Edmonton.
There were issues with at-grade crossings and 40-year-old train upgrades. But there was also the human side, said Thales vice-president Dave Beckley. Helping city officials trust that a complex new technology is safe caused yet more headaches.
“A big challenge is education, fundamentally,” he said. “It’s at all levels of the organization.”
Beckley met with Postmedia to defend the company and tell what he sees as the larger story of a complicated contract — made subject to a notice of default — from a perspective even council hasn’t heard.
The company made monumental strides that Edmonton neglected to celebrate, he said, and not every delay in getting the Metro Line running properly is on Thales.
He said when Edmonton officials didn’t trust Thales’ safety case to put the line in service, the company spent more than one year waiting for a second company to complete a review.
“That external consultant did an absolute deep dive into our records, spent months and months going through the details, and concluded that Thales’ safety case was valid,” Beckley said.
That was “a great redemption for Thales. Unfortunately, it chewed up over a year-plus of project time.”
After the safety case was accepted, Edmonton finally let trains speed up and the company turned its full attention to Plan A: using new technology in the tunnel to restore frequency on the original Capital Line.
City council threatened to terminate the Thales contract in December after nearly seven years of work. It gave a “notice of default” on May 1. But Thales has one more chance to make things work.
The company submitted a new schedule for review Monday and officials were evaluating it Friday.
Beckley said he can’t reveal deadlines in the new schedule until the city accepts it because testing must be approved by Edmonton Transit.
“We’re extremely close,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of testing in the last few months with the full cooperation of the city.”
STEEP LEARNING CURVE
Beckley said the learning curve on this technology is steep because it’s very different from the signalling system Edmonton is used to. It’s like jumping straight to using a bank card rather than cash — there’s a feeling of unease.
With current technology, train operators rely on trackside red and green lights and mechanical train detectors to ensure safety. This new system uses radio-frequency locators and computers to automatically route trains and provide backup safety systems.
“There’s so many checks and balances, but they’re highly technical,” said Beckley. “They’re not visible to the naked eye because we have millions of lines of software code that make all those checks and balances happen.”
In an update last week, Edmonton head of infrastructure Adam Laughlin said Thales has reliability issues along the line. The team told council of six instances where the computer sent a train onto the wrong track or failed to engage the traffic crossing arms properly.
Both Laughlin and Thales officials said safety was never compromised. The system went to a failsafe mode using redundancies. It’s these “what if ” situations the company is still testing, said Beckley.
A WARNING TO COUNCIL
Building the signal system is a partnership, said Beckley. His team didn’t achieve service by the original spring 2014 deadline, but part of the delay came from city officials asking for changes in the design, he said.
Edmonton had nearly $10-million worth of change orders, increasing the contract price to $55 million from the $45.4 million Thales quoted in 2011.
The design of the system was not finalized until January 2016.
But the end is in sight, he said, with a warning to council if they think trying a new signalling system is easier.
“Anything is possible. But it would require major, major surgery and disruption to the railway,” Beckley said, offering to come explain the system and progress to council and the public in person.
Thales is in this for the long haul and wants to work with the city, he said. “(Starting over) would be unfortunate and definitely not productive considering where we are today.”
‘CREAKY’ OLD TRAINS
Edmonton’s Metro LRT line posed two major technical challenges to signals engineers — it has 13 at-grade crossings within three kilometres and required retrofitting 40-year-old trains with new technology.
These challenges were underestimated.
Going in, Thales had never applied its radio signal-based system to at-grade crossings. According to documents previously obtained by Postmedia, Edmonton officials identified that in their evaluation comments before awarding the bid.
Beckley said both sides underestimated both the complexity involved in linking the Thales technology to Edmonton’s traffic signal system and the effect of the trains on vehicle traffic.
Beckley feels the challenge of retrofitting old trains has been downplayed in the city’s updates to the public. Some of the vehicles were in service 40 years ago.
“That’s creaky,” he said, and older than anything Thales attempted to retrofit before.
They still, today, have an unregulated power supply, which means the on-board computer can’t get the consistent 115 volts you’d get from plugging into a normal power outlet today.
“The voltage can vary quite widely,” he said.
It was so bad, when they first hooked five 40-year-old trains together, the voltage swung so low that the brakes came on.
Plus, each train has been fixed and modified so many times over the years, not one is identical. They needed “a unique wiring diagram for every single train.”
This issue is what got them again in January, he said.
Only when the team tried putting the oldest trains to work on the Metro Line did they discover the wheels spun unpredictably. They don’t grip the track properly, a problem because the Thales signalling system relies on a wheel tachometer as one of four devices tracking the train’s precise location.
That’s why the team missed the latest deadline.
“We had to redesign the whole algorithm,” he said.
The last trains successfully went in service in early April.