Commuters frustrated with multiple metro problems

CTV Montreal: Metro frustrations Commuters are getting fed up after three days of significant delays on the metro system in one week.

Commuters are getting fed up with three days of significant delays on the metro system.

On Thursday morning a train running on the Green Line had a mechanical problem around 8:30 a.m.

The train lost traction for an as-yet-unexplained reason.

It took 90 minutes to get that train off the tracks, and during that time no metro cars could run between Pie IX and Honoré Beaugrand.

As a stopgap measure the STM ran shuttle buses from the eastern end of the Green Line to Pie IX and back.

Commuters have had enough.

"This is very fed up for me because I have to... I have my internship. I'm late," said one very frustrated woman.

One man was caught in both Thursday's and Wednesday's stoppage.

"It's kind of chaotic. Because yesterday we were stopped at Berri-UQAM. Today we're stuck at Pie IX."

Another woman said she gets frustrated because the STM kept changing its estimates of when service would be restored.

"First they told us the metro was going to start at 9;00 then it went back to 9:30 and then 9:45 so we were like okay we're taking the bus," she said.

Other commuters said the delay made them an hour and a half later for work.

Meanwhile there were problems with emergency communications equipment throughout the system on Tuesday and Wednesday.

One day the emergency landlines at each station were out of service, so the STM stopped all trains as a precaution.

The other day the emergency radios in the trains themselves stopped working, and so again the STM shut down the metro until the problem was fixed.

The CEO of the STM, Luc Tremblay, said it was prudent to stop the trains in both cases because if there were an emergency, it would be impossible to communicate with commuters.

"We were working on the firewall of the system and it's an operation that we are doing every day but this time it did not work correctly," said Tremblay.

He apologized to commuters, and said that type of problem should not happen again.

"In the future when we are going to work on the firewall, we are going to do it during the night," said Tremblay.

"For the other problem that we had with the radio, the system is kind of aging and we are doing a tender right now to make sure that we're going to replace the system and it's going to be corrected in the beginning of 2017."

On Tuesday morning there was another problem on the Green Line: smoke filled the Frontenac station, forcing a cancellation of service for about an hour until the smoke cleared.

Projet Montreal councillor Craig Sauvé said having so many problems crop up in one week was unacceptable.

It's a sentiment that many agreed with.

"They want us to take the train. They want us to not come in the city with our car, but at the same time we have no service. You can see it is the third time in one week!" said one man.