Ottawa knows a thing or two about LRT growing pains, and that's exactly why the city's transit community has been watching Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown saga with equal parts sympathy and solidarity. Now, there's a milestone worth noting: Line 5 Eglinton is extending its service hours beginning Sunday, April 5, with trains running later into the night as the TTC moves toward full operations.
A Long Road to Later Hours
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT — officially branded Line 5 — has had one of the most drawn-out and troubled launches in Canadian transit history. Years behind schedule and mired in contractor disputes, the line only began limited service in late 2024. The extension of evening hours marks a meaningful step toward the kind of reliable, frequent service that riders were promised.
Starting April 5, Torontonians will be able to board Line 5 trains later into the night, giving commuters and evening travellers more flexibility on one of Toronto's busiest east-west corridors.
Why Ottawa Is Paying Attention
For Ottawa, this isn't just a Toronto story. The capital's own O-Train Confederation Line has faced its share of headlines — from door malfunctions to suspension failures — and the city has been working through its own LRT reliability improvements over the past few years.
Watching how the TTC manages its rollout offers real lessons for transit agencies like OC Transpo: extended service hours only succeed when the underlying systems — trains, signals, maintenance crews — are ready to support them. A phased approach to expanding hours, rather than flipping everything on at once, appears to be the model Toronto is following.
Ottawa riders and advocates who've pushed for extended O-Train hours on weekends and late nights will find the Toronto situation familiar. The appetite for later LRT service exists in both cities; the challenge is always operational readiness.
What Full Operations Could Look Like
The TTC has indicated that the extended hours are part of a broader push toward full Line 5 operations. For a line that stretches across Eglinton Avenue from Kennedy Station in the east to Mount Dennis in the west — with a central tunnel segment — full operations represent a significant increase in capacity and coverage for Toronto's midtown.
For Ottawa, the hope is that Toronto's hard-won lessons make their way into best practices shared across Canadian transit networks. Both cities invested heavily in LRT as the backbone of their transit futures. Seeing that investment deliver reliable, extended service — even if it's taken longer than anyone wanted — is a sign the technology can work when the pieces come together.
The Bigger Picture for Canadian Transit
Canada's major cities are all in various stages of LRT expansion. Ottawa has its Stage 2 extensions underway, Toronto is working through Line 5 and planning Line 6 Finch West, and other cities are watching closely.
Every operational improvement on any of these lines — including something as incremental as running trains a bit later at night — adds to the collective knowledge base. And for Ottawa commuters who've been through the O-Train's own turbulent chapters, that kind of progress, however gradual, is worth tracking.
Source: Global News Ottawa / Line 5 Eglinton trains to run later into the night starting Sunday
