VIA Rail

[Urban Sky]

I think I have things figured out (though it is a little kludgy). While I have great faith in you as a resource, the thing that bothered me is the following page from the VIA's presentation at the 2019 NGEC Meeting (which was after the RFQ in 2018) clearly says the corridor fleet currently has 160 cars with a total capacity of 9120 seats (between the 9,536 and 8,816 we had calculated).
View attachment 292697

I just couldn't figure out how to manipulate the numbers to get the quoted 160 cars with a total capacity of 9120 seats. It then hit me. They are saying cars not coaches. What if they are including baggage and service cars?

If you look at the cycling plan, it lists 4 types of HEP cars (H2 CO, H1 CO, H2 CL and BAG) as well as 4 types of Renaissance cars (BAG, CO, VIA1, and SERV). I assume:

• H1 = HEP I,
• H2 = HEP II,
• CO = Economy Coach,
• CL (or VIA1) = Business Coach,
• BAG = Baggage, and
• SERV = Service

Looking at a picture of a Renaissance train I took on May 5, 2018 (below), I saw that it had 7 cars, and looking at cycling plan, that would make sense as with 2 active trains, each would have 1 Baggage car, 4 Economy Coaches, 1 Business Coach and 1 Service car, which aligns with the cycling plan. With the assumption that (as @Urban Sky said) there was (in addition to the trains in the cycling plan) also an identical reserve Renaissance train being counted, that would bring us up to 21 (not the 23 the slide above says, but close, I will get back to that later).

Continuing along in the same vain, cycling plan lists 5 HEP I Coach and 2 Baggage (which would also be HEP I ) so that is likely the 7 HEP I cars. It also lists 19 HEP II Economy and 8 HEP Business Coaches. If you (similar to Renaissance) you also add a reserve HEP II train with 4 Economy and 2 Business Coaches (a common configuration) that gets the number of HEP II cars to 33 (and matches the number of HEP II Economy class cars and Galley business cars listed on VIA's website). By doing all of this, I got the both the number of cars and the Total Capacity very close, but not quite right.

For the total capacity, the HEP I Economy class cars, can have either 60 or 62 seats. If I assume that 2 have 62 seats and 3 have 60 seats, then it works out perfectly. Or it could be that they just rounded the number to 9120, because it was divisible by 32. Either way, it is close.

As for the number of cars, VIA does have a total of 9 Renaissance baggage cars (and 3 Renaissance baggage transition cars). It is possible they assigned an extra 2 (5 instead of 3) to the Corridor fleet for some reason. That also brings the number of Renaissance cars up to 23 as claimed. It is a stretch I know, but it does make the numbers work. Any better ideas?

When you put all of this together, here is what you get:

Type	Qty	Capacity	Total Capacity
LRC Economy	71	68	4828
LRC Business	26	44	1144
LRC Total	97		5972
HEP II Coach	23	68	1564
HEP I Coach	2	62	124
HEP I Coach b	3	60	180
HEP II Club	10	56	560
HEP I Baggage	2	0	0
HEP Total	40		2428
Ren Baggage	5	0	0
Ren. Coach	12	48	576
Ren. Business	3	48	144
Ren Service	3	0	0
Ren. Total	23		720
Econ. Total	106	65.7	6968
Bus. Total	39	47.4	1848
Total	160		9120

View attachment 292746

Thank you so much for posting this, it is much less awkward for me if I don’t feel tempted to post such a table myself!

Just two comments:

• The HEP I cars with a “Snack bar” (which is just a Galley like in the HEP II cars) are cars 8145-8147, which are used exclusively on the Jonquière and Senneterre services (to be able to offer snacks to passengers).
• There must have been a third HEP I Baggage car, to act as a back-up for the two in service (on Set 1 and Set 4).

That said, even I struggle to exactly reconcile some of the subtotals with what I believe to have been the reality when the RFP was written (and I have been involved in determining the appropriate fleet size for the RFP!), but the bottom line is that none of the subtotals (number of cars per fleet type) is infeasible (i.e. larger than the number of cars in the actual fleet) and that the total seat count is plausible (i.e. it is possible to reconcile it with the subtotals provided without making outlandish assumptions and with a deviation of less than 0.1%).

Therefore, I can’t thank you enough for demonstrating that the size of the new fleet represents almost perfectly the “one for one” fleet replacement which was advertised, which should allow for a slight increase in seat miles, thanks to higher fleet availability and utilization...!

 

[crs1026]

^Great sleuthing work.

My impression is that there were more “borrowed” HEP I coaches in corridor service pre-COViD than that chart accounts for, possibly that would also affect the “true” numbers a touch.

The count is certainly close enough to accept the one-for-one premise, and similarly it’s intuitively sensible to assume the new fleet will be more reliable and more efficient to deploy. It would be nice to know what VIA and “Ottawa” estimate that achievable stretch would amount to....2% ? 5%.? 20?

The trouble with stretch goals is, sometimes it’s constructive to make people accountable to find the higher performance themselves, and sometimes it’s like asking them to flap their wings and fly. I would be happier if Ottawa were to have granted some measure of new capacity and then told VIA that any additional growth is theirs to extract from utilization. VIA has certainly earned that level of enabling support given the ridership growth they have achieved over the past decade. One-for-one is good, but just not as enabling as I had hoped. Let's hope HFR procurement improves on that.

- Paul

 

[Bordercollie]

^Great sleuthing work.

My impression is that there were more “borrowed” HEP I coaches in corridor service pre-COViD than that chart accounts for, possibly that would also affect the “true” numbers a touch.

The count is certainly close enough to accept the one-for-one premise, and similarly it’s intuitively sensible to assume the new fleet will be more reliable and more efficient to deploy. It would be nice to know what VIA and “Ottawa” estimate that achievable stretch would amount to....2% ? 5%.? 20?

The trouble with stretch goals is, sometimes it’s constructive to make people accountable to find the higher performance themselves, and sometimes it’s like asking them to flap their wings and fly. I would be happier if Ottawa were to have granted some measure of new capacity and then told VIA that any additional growth is theirs to extract from utilization. VIA has certainly earned that level of enabling support given the ridership growth they have achieved over the past decade. One-for-one is good, but just not as enabling as I had hoped. Let's hope HFR procurement improves on that.

- Paul

That's likely because the HEP II fleet is being refurbished.

 

[robmausser]

• The HEP I cars with a “Snack bar” (which is just a Galley like in the HEP II cars) are cars 8145-8147, which are used exclusively on the Jonquière and Senneterre s

With these HEP snack bars and the Renaissance trains, Quebec has had much better service than the rest of Canada in terms of fleet and comfort. Its painfully obvious where Via is headquartered and who they pay lip service to.

 

[Urban Sky]

With these HEP snack bars and the Renaissance trains, Quebec has had much better service than the rest of Canada in terms of fleet and comfort. Its painfully obvious where Via is headquartered and who they pay lip service to.

My sincere apologies for not letting the passengers on our Northern Quebec services starve (no galley or dining facilities = no food service on an 8-12 hour journey) and I'd suggest that you first have a ride on a Renaissance train before you become envious of the passengers who have no choice but to enjoy its comfort...^^

In the meanwhile, a simple look in any schedule of the 45-ish years of VIA’s existence would debunk your conspiracy theory of Quebec-centrism:

Here my full post from back then:

I'm not sure why exactly, but this quote still irritates the hell out of me, even 2 weeks after I first read your article: It's of course true that service (expressed in scheduled intercity passenger train mileage per week) in Southwestern Ontario is down by almost two-thirds since its record high in 1951, but when actually looking at how intercity services have actually developed in the Corridor over the last decades, it should become clear that the focus focus has not exactly been on the Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec route, which will become clear when comparing the relative size of the stacked areas in brown tones (i.e. Southwestern Ontario) with those in blue tones (i.e. Quebec-Montreal-Ottawa):
View attachment 209546
Compiled from: official CN, CP and VIA timetables
Note: The current weekly mileage of Southwest Ontario is 30,244 km, which is 66.8% below than the record high of 85,486 km in 1951 and 1.2% above the post-1950 low of 29,896 km, whereas Quebec-Ottawa-Montreal accounts for 32,143 km (47.9% below the record high of 61,678 km, but 63.6% higher than the post-1950 low of 19,652 km in 1990-1992) and the remainder of the Corridor (i.e. Montreal/Ottawa-Toronto) accounts for 104,484 (which is an all-time high and 84.4% above the post-1950 low of 56,648 km in 1990-1992)

I suspect that what triggers me is that it seems to exploit the narrative that VIA's services are biased towards the province where its HQ is located (and therefore most of its administrative staff is located and originates from). Because "the Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City area" just becomes a code for "Quebec", once you consider that the area covers 100% of VIA's 367 km of Corridor network in Quebec (i.e. Quebec-Montreal-QC/ON border), but maybe only 10% (QC/ON border-Ottawa-Fallowfield: 120 km) of VIA's 1,395 km of Corridor network in Ontario:
View attachment 209547

In reality, however, only 18.6% of all Corridor mileage falls onto the province of Quebec, which is exactly half (!) of its share of the population of both provinces combined (37.8% in the 2016 Census). Furthermore, only 2.4% (in words: less than a fortieth!!!) of all Corridor mileage falls on train services which operate only within Quebec (there are so few left that you can count them with four fingers: #20, #25, #29 and #622, collectively accounting for as little as 15 one-way journeys between Quebec and Montreal per week) and both figures happen to be the lowest Quebec has ever seen:
View attachment 209548
Compiled from: official CN, CP and VIA timetables
Note: the highest share of Corridor mileage in Quebec was 36.0% in the confederation year 1967 (or if excluding inter-provincial services: 15.8% in 1989).

Therefore, rather than blaming Quebec for their own misery, the mayors and local politicians in Southwestern Ontario may ask themselves if the fact that they are the only area of the Corridor which has even less (rather than significantly more) intercity passenger rail service than directly after the January 1990 cuts could be related to their selfish and ultimately counter-productive and self-defeating tendency to object against any passenger rail investment program which doesn't reach into their own city rather than uniting behind a consolidated plan which will bring better rail passenger rail service incrementally and progressively into the entire region...

 

[Allandale25]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1346969407902384133

 

[rbt]

In the meanwhile, a simple look in any schedule of the 45-ish years of VIA’s existence would debunk your conspiracy theory of Quebec-centrism:

If Ottawa station happened to be 4km west in Gatineau, would that chart be almost entirely purple?

 

[Urban Sky]

If Ottawa station happened to be 4km west in Gatineau, would that chart be almost entirely purple?

I hate to say this, but I don’t believe that it reflects particularly well on your home province that the only people in this country who whine that the distribution of VIA services is unfairly skewed against their own province reliably come from the one province which has less than two-fifths of the country’s population, but receives more service than the rest of the country combined:

You can read my full post here:

High Speed Rail: London - Kitchener-Waterloo - Pearson Airport - Toronto

I appreciate the public service that Via provides to remote communities. Not unlike Canada Post, the government has a country-building responsibility in keeping these services going, as long as we're not holding back the parts of the country that create the most wealth for the country. There is...

urbantoronto.ca

 

[rbt]

I hate to say this, but I don’t believe that it reflects particularly well on your home province that the only people in this country who whine that the distribution of VIA services is unfairly skewed against their own province reliably come from the one province which has less than two-fifths of the country’s population, but receives more service than the rest of the country combined:

I was asking a question to see if I understood how the chart was created; and I still don't know the answer.

Is it based on start and end point for the entire trip (Union or even Windsor to Ottawa) or is it based on individual segments (Union to Fallowfield would be Ontario, and Fallowfield to a relocated Ottawa would be interprovincial).

Would a scheduled train from Toronto to Montreal via Ottawa, as HFR will make common, show as Red/Purple/Blue, Red/Purple, or entirely Purple?

Seeing how a metric responds to small random changes in how the information is organized (i.e. shift a station a small distance, mark runs for physical equipment moves instead of by ticketing practice, make each station to station segment a run number, etc.) lets me know the real value of the metric: what the metric is actually presenting rather than what we believe it is presenting. Normally that's a mental exercise but the chart doesn't provide much detail about the method of it's creation.

I suspect it's based on VIA's virtual Train Numbers start/end point, not physical equipment moves (which may be used for more than 1 run; Windsor to Ottawa for example), or station-to-station segments.

 

[Urban Sky]

I was asking a question to see if I understood how the chart was created; and I still don't know the answer.

Is it based on start and end point for the entire trip (Union or even Windsor to Ottawa) or is it based on individual segments (Union to Fallowfield would be Ontario, and Fallowfield to a relocated Ottawa would be interprovincial).

Would a scheduled train from Toronto to Montreal via Ottawa, as HFR will make common, show as Red/Purple/Blue, Red/Purple, or entirely Purple?

Seeing how a metric responds to small random changes in how the information is organized (i.e. shift a station a small distance, mark runs for physical equipment moves instead of by ticketing practice, make each station to station segment a run number, etc.) lets me know the real value of the metric: what the metric is actually presenting rather than what we believe it is presenting. Normally that's a mental exercise but the chart doesn't provide much detail about the method of it's creation.

I suspect it's based on VIA's virtual Train Numbers start/end point, not physical equipment moves (which may be used for more than 1 run; Windsor to Ottawa for example), or station-to-station segments.

My sincere apologies (this time without any hint of sarcasm!) for brushing off your question, to which I will answer as follows:

All interprovincial services (i.e. services which cross the border between Quebec and Ontario) are shown in purple, whereas all interprovincial services are shown in either red or blue (depending on whether they operate in Ontario or Quebec). Consequently, any Toronto-Ottawa train venturing into Quebec (like they did through Hull until the closure of Ottawa Union Station in 1966) would be purple rather than red or any (Quebec-)Montreal-Ottawa train staying north of the Ottawa River (like the ex-CP route which operated via Lachute until 1981) and terminating in Hull rather than continuing into Ottawa would be blue rather than purple.

However, none of the above will alter significantly the fact that the share of Corridor mileage which falls onto tracks located on the Quebec side of the interprovincial border (refer to the yellow line!) is only half the proportion of Quebec’s part in the population which the two provinces share between them (refer to the black line!):

In reality, however, only 18.6% of all Corridor mileage falls onto the province of Quebec, which is exactly half (!) of its share of the population of both provinces combined (37.8% in the 2016 Census). Furthermore, only 2.4% (in words: less than a fortieth!!!) of all Corridor mileage falls on train services which operate only within Quebec (there are so few left that you can count them with four fingers: #20, #25, #29 and #622, collectively accounting for as little as 15 one-way journeys between Quebec and Montreal per week) and both figures happen to be the lowest Quebec has ever seen:

Compiled from: official CN, CP and VIA timetables
Note: the highest share of Corridor mileage in Quebec was 36.0% in the confederation year 1967 (or if excluding inter-provincial services: 15.8% in 1989).

Maybe the fact that Ontario has 2.7 times* as much service per capita as Quebec explains why I react so allergic against any suggestion that Quebec would receive favourable treatment over Ontario (of all provinces!). It sometimes seems to me that certain Ontarians would only be satisfied if VIA terminates all service beyond their provincial border, while still having the federal taxpayer pay for it...^^

*Calculation: [(1-0.186)/(1-0.378)]/(0.186/0.378)=2.66

 

[roger1818]

Thank you so much for posting this, it is much less awkward for me if I don’t feel tempted to post such a table myself!

Thanks for your feedback! I really appreciate it.

Just two comments:

• The HEP I cars with a “Snack bar” (which is just a Galley like in the HEP II cars) are cars 8145-8147, which are used exclusively on the Jonquière and Senneterre services (to be able to offer snacks to passengers).

Ya. I didn't really like using 3 of the HEP I cars with a “Snack bar” in my count, but it was the only way I could get the seat count to add up. I wasn't sure if they were leftover from something else and had never had the seating reconfigured, but you would certainly know better than me. Without using them, I get 9126 seats, which would round up, not down (unless they are rounding to the nearest multiple of 32).

• There must have been a third HEP I Baggage car, to act as a back-up for the two in service (on Set 1 and Set 4).

Possibly. I didn't include any more because I already had the 7 HEP I cars the slide said there was. I see two possible explanations.

1. They were 2 spare HEP I baggage cars for corridor use, but when putting together the proposal, VIA was afraid that the government would insist VIA "dispose" of an cars that were replaced in the new order. Since the HEP I Baggage cars are of general use across the entire network, and they have more Renaissance baggage cars than they need, they "assigned" a couple to the corridor to be sacrificed.
2. Since the Canadian (out of Toronto) and the Northern Quebec trains (out of Montreal) both use HEP I Baggage cars, maybe the spares are a shared resource. Removal of the need for a spare along the corridor won't remove the need for a spare in either city's maintenance centres.

It could also be some combination of the two.

That said, even I struggle to exactly reconcile some of the subtotals with what I believe to have been the reality when the RFP was written (and I have been involved in determining the appropriate fleet size for the RFP!), but the bottom line is that none of the subtotals (number of cars per fleet type) is infeasible (i.e. larger than the number of cars in the actual fleet) and that the total seat count is plausible (i.e. it is possible to reconcile it with the subtotals provided without making outlandish assumptions and with a deviation of less than 0.1%).

Therefore, I can’t thank you enough for demonstrating that the size of the new fleet represents almost perfectly the “one for one” fleet replacement which was advertised, which should allow for a slight increase in seat miles, thanks to higher fleet availability and utilization...!

One thing it does show, is that VIA knows how to play the game. It gives me confidence that, while the original RFQ was for 32 x 285 passenger 5 car trains to match what they are replacing, VIA will have Siemens modify the quantity of each type of coach to match the number needed for the fleet of different length trains they are wanting, in hopes that the bean counters will only look at the number of cars received and not the number of seats (which would likely increase).

 

[trebello]

With The Canadian continuing its shortened Vancouver-Winnipeg run (removing Toronto - Sudbury entirely), what do people think the post-covid future of this train is? As has been mentioned, VIA's Corporate Plan notes that the current business model is "is no longer sustainable", but it seems unlikely VIA would cancel this train outright. I say this because the optics would likely be poor for the government to cancel the best-known service in Western Canada as inter-city bus services are cancelled and as the MMIWG notes the importance of intercity transit, plus with the carbon tax increasing it doesn't look great to remove transit options (even though almost no one actually uses The Canadian for regular inter-city travel). I could be wrong on this, but it seems like something people would use to get upset about, even if they have no intention of ever stepping on a train.

Many users on here seem much more knowledgeable than me on this, so assuming VIA keeps this service, is there any possibility of:

• Permanently breaking the train into different segments (e.g. Vancouver - Edmonton, Edmonton - Winnipeg, Winnipeg - Toronto). This would likely help OTP, but could decrease international tourists going from Toronto to Vancouver in Prestige Class
• Using the CP route from Toronto to Winnipeg. Transport Canada seems to suggest this route has seen declining traffic relative to the CN route and it would serve Thunder Bay, which has been requesting the return of train service. Not sure if VIA is mandated to serve many of the smaller communities along the CN line, but they could possibly do this using the Budd Cars from the Sudbury - White River train.
• Using other tracks in some places (looking at old timetables it looks like at one point VIA ran service from Winnipeg to Saskatoon via Regina instead of Melville). This seems rather unlikely, especially given part of the tracks are now owned by a small short-line railway.
• Working out an agreement with CN to help pay some capital costs of lengthening sidings (maybe in exchange for better OTP)

...or any other possibilities?

 

[Richard White]

With The Canadian continuing its shortened Vancouver-Winnipeg run (removing Toronto - Sudbury entirely), what do people think the post-covid future of this train is? As has been mentioned, VIA's Corporate Plan notes that the current business model is "is no longer sustainable", but it seems unlikely VIA would cancel this train outright. I say this because the optics would likely be poor for the government to cancel the best-known service in Western Canada as inter-city bus services are cancelled and as the MMIWG notes the importance of intercity transit, plus with the carbon tax increasing it doesn't look great to remove transit options (even though almost no one actually uses The Canadian for regular inter-city travel). I could be wrong on this, but it seems like something people would use to get upset about, even if they have no intention of ever stepping on a train.

Many users on here seem much more knowledgeable than me on this, so assuming VIA keeps this service, is there any possibility of:

• Permanently breaking the train into different segments (e.g. Vancouver - Edmonton, Edmonton - Winnipeg, Winnipeg - Toronto). This would likely help OTP, but could decrease international tourists going from Toronto to Vancouver in Prestige Class
• Using the CP route from Toronto to Winnipeg. Transport Canada seems to suggest this route has seen declining traffic relative to the CN route and it would serve Thunder Bay, which has been requesting the return of train service. Not sure if VIA is mandated to serve many of the smaller communities along the CN line, but they could possibly do this using the Budd Cars from the Sudbury - White River train.
• Using other tracks in some places (looking at old timetables it looks like at one point VIA ran service from Winnipeg to Saskatoon via Regina instead of Melville). This seems rather unlikely, especially given part of the tracks are now owned by a small short-line railway.
• Working out an agreement with CN to help pay some capital costs of lengthening sidings (maybe in exchange for better OTP)

...or any other possibilities?

If they substantially lowered the cost more people would use it. If nothing else the Canadian has iconic views and is truly an experience but the cost is insane. I looked at taking it years ago for the experience but I had no desire to pay over 5000 dollars each way for a proper bed as opposed to sleeping in my seat.

It should be extended to Halifax from Vancouver (with no transfer in Toronto or Quebec). Tying it in with the ocean would make it truly a national experience.

 

[cplchanb]

With The Canadian continuing its shortened Vancouver-Winnipeg run (removing Toronto - Sudbury entirely), what do people think the post-covid future of this train is? As has been mentioned, VIA's Corporate Plan notes that the current business model is "is no longer sustainable", but it seems unlikely VIA would cancel this train outright. I say this because the optics would likely be poor for the government to cancel the best-known service in Western Canada as inter-city bus services are cancelled and as the MMIWG notes the importance of intercity transit, plus with the carbon tax increasing it doesn't look great to remove transit options (even though almost no one actually uses The Canadian for regular inter-city travel). I could be wrong on this, but it seems like something people would use to get upset about, even if they have no intention of ever stepping on a train.

Many users on here seem much more knowledgeable than me on this, so assuming VIA keeps this service, is there any possibility of:

• Permanently breaking the train into different segments (e.g. Vancouver - Edmonton, Edmonton - Winnipeg, Winnipeg - Toronto). This would likely help OTP, but could decrease international tourists going from Toronto to Vancouver in Prestige Class
• Using the CP route from Toronto to Winnipeg. Transport Canada seems to suggest this route has seen declining traffic relative to the CN route and it would serve Thunder Bay, which has been requesting the return of train service. Not sure if VIA is mandated to serve many of the smaller communities along the CN line, but they could possibly do this using the Budd Cars from the Sudbury - White River train.
• Using other tracks in some places (looking at old timetables it looks like at one point VIA ran service from Winnipeg to Saskatoon via Regina instead of Melville). This seems rather unlikely, especially given part of the tracks are now owned by a small short-line railway.
• Working out an agreement with CN to help pay some capital costs of lengthening sidings (maybe in exchange for better OTP)

...or any other possibilities?

I agree with breaking it up to east and west branches. Perhaps they can throw in a couple full segment trips per week but it will greatly help keep trains on time and lower cost if it wasnt a a single long route.
That way they can also increase frequency and decrease train size to cater for the region.

 

[cplchanb]

If they substantially lowered the cost more people would use it. If nothing else the Canadian has iconic views and is truly an experience but the cost is insane. I looked at taking it years ago for the experience but I had no desire to pay over 5000 dollars each way for a proper bed as opposed to sleeping in my seat.

It should be extended to Halifax from Vancouver (with no transfer in Toronto or Quebec). Tying it in with the ocean would make it truly a national experience.

they can have perhaps a single train like per week or biweekly. it makes no sense to do this for every train. it would cost way too much for return and not to mention the potential delays would be to risky long term. Given that Tor to Van is already exprecting 24hr delay avg, youre looking at possibly 48hr delay from coast to coast, which honestly would be unacceptable to any rider.