You are correctly naming the culprit for the unfortunate naming of the LRT station serving VIA Rail's Ottawa station (and much more serious misjudgments), but it's certainly not VIA's fault for not having renamed the station to fit within Ottawa's rigid LRT station naming conventions. Cities all over the world have coped with name-less train stations when naming their LRT stations. Ottawa is the notable exception by nothing else than choice.
You only have to look at Montreal to see what happens if you let non-experts and politicians design transportation infrastructure and networks, with a new combined highway-and-rail bridge built for many billions (
but with specifications so flimsy which preclude most heavy rail applications) and a tunnel which has been converted from open heavy rail standard to a closed Light Metro system (just at the very moment where a High Speed Rail project was planned which would suffer near-fatal blows to its business case if it couldn't use that tunnel). Similarly, Ottawa instead on choosing the one LRT consortium which
failed to achieve "the minimum technical score to qualify for the project" at its own peril...
Let's just stick to "train station" and urban rail networks Canada (from East-to-West):
The STM
calls its subway service "
Métro" (i.e., not a "train" service) and its stops "
Stations" (i.e., not a "train station"):
The REM calls its
service "
light rail transit" and its
stops "
REM stations":
The TTC calls its subway services "
Subway Lines" and its
stops "
Stations" or "
Stops" and its streetcar services "
Streetcar Lines" and their stops "
stops":
Edmonton
calls its LRT service "
LRT" and its stops "
LRT stations":
Calgary
calls its LRT service "
CTrain" and its stops "
CTrain stations":
Finally, Translink
calls Vancouver's Light Metro network "
SkyTrain" and its stops "
SkyTrain Stations":
As we can see with these seven urban rail networks across Canada, no Canadian city refers to any of its urban rail networks as a "train" service and their stops as "train stations".
Conversely, there actually is one rail service in this country, which
does call its
services a "train" service and their
stops "train stations":
Therefore, the claim that naming any of Ottawa's LRT stations "Train Station" would have been confusing for any Canadian resident appears to me as a fabricated claim to somehow excuse the bizarre refusal of the City of Ottawa and its transit operator OC Transpo to name its LRT station at Tremblay Road after the only train station which serves the actual city (as opposed to Fallowfield station which serves its Barrhaven suburb). And just to be sure, there are many valid alternatives to "Train Station", such as calling it "VIA Rail Station", "VIA Rail" or even "Tremblay (VIA Rail Station)"...
