Delivery of the first vehicle for Waterloo Region’s Ion light rail transit system may miss yet another deadline, according to a regional councillor who visited Bombardier’s factory in Thunder Bay this week.

Bombardier had initially said it would get the first vehicle into the region by this past August. That target date was later pushed back to December.

Coun. Tom Galloway was part of a delegation from Waterloo Region that travelled to Thunder Bay on Wednesday to see progress on the vehicle for themselves.

Galloway says Bombardier representatives said they were still on-schedule, although the vehicle is still in the final stages of production and will need to go through testing before it is shipped south.

“While Bombardier is still saying it should arrive in December, I think more realistically it’ll be fairly early in the new year,” he said in an interview.

“They’re already five months late, and they’re going to be possibly even further (delayed).”

Only one vehicle for the Ion system will be assembled in Thunder Bay.

The rest will be put together at a Bombardier facility in Kingston, where Galloway says work has begun on one of the vehicles.

Galloway says that based on what he saw in Thunder Bay, he expects the first light rail vehicle to arrive in Waterloo Region at some point “over the next few months.”

What he’s more concerned about, he says, is when the full order is ready – because only once that point is reached will the region and GrandLinq be able to move ahead with starting Ion service.

On that score, Galloway says he sees signs that Bombardier is “turning things around” after running into a series of problems.

“We heard from them that they continue to have some issues and problems, but they are working on them one at a time,” he said.

The scheduled start date for Ion service has already been pushed back from late 2017 to early 2018 due to delays in building the vehicles.

With reporting by Leena Latafat