I think Capital Railways is just the portions owned by the City of Ottawa for running the O-Train.
A lot of the literature agrees with your point:
2001, April 12 - The Capital Railway comes into existence. Owned by the City of Ottawa, it leases the CPR Ellwood subdivision and the North Prescott spur, 8.17 miles as well as part of Walkley Yard.
This is from the same link I posted earlier:
2005, May 6 - City of Ottawa (Capital Rail) takes ownership of the following lines:
Ellwood subdivision between mile 0.00 and mile 4.99 (Ottawa West)
Prescott subdivision between mile 4.90 and mile 4.99 (Greenboro)
Prescott subdivision between mile 4.99 and 8.17 (Leitrim Road). This is excepted track for possible future expansion.
Walkley Line between the junction with the Ellwood subdivision and Albion Road
On this date the City leased the line east of Albion Road to the Walkley Repair Facility.
2006, January 24 - City of Ottawa (Capital Rail) takes ownership of the Prescott subdivision between mile 7.17 and mile 25.42 (Highway 416). This is excepted track for possible future expansion.
http://www.railways.incanada.net/candate/street.htm
But there's missing information about the NCC transferring ownership of the Walkley Yards to Capital Railway, the latter, btw, being formed as a requirement of TC for OCTranspo to operate over the CP rail line (Heavy Rail) and over the bridge to Quebec. TC was setting precedent by allowing mixed 'light and heavy rail' on the same line, albeit temporally separated.
Here's a map clearly showing the NCC lines in Ottawa:
Click here to download the Ontario Railway Map Collection
Release Mark: Alpha 14
Last updated: 10th May 2016
The NCC trackage is extensive and marked in light blue on that map (you need an app like Google Earth to support rendition of this map) with this note pointing to the trackage:
National Capital Commission
Main line from the Canadian National Railway through Walkley yard and east then north to industrial service track.
But there's also reference on that map to this note: (as well as many others)
National Capital Commission
Canadian pacific Railway Walkley yard wye. Present in 1991.
It raises many questions, one being if the NCC owned the RoW, but leased overhead rights to other operators? Or was the trackage owned by other railways as a landlease on land owned by the NCC? I'm still digging on this, and coming up empty. I might contact one of the members from Ottawa that is responsible for producing the map. It's a fascinating story, no matter what the details are.
In the event, I was using this as a precedent as to how various levels of government could build the Missing Link and then, at least in the interim, lease running rights over it with an eye to outright sale later. There appears to be a large amount of interest in exploring that option from Mississauga in cahoots with the other municipalities named prior, the Province, and ostensibly the Feds, the latter being a likely candidate to at least seed the project financially. The powers to doing it are clearly delineated in the Transportation Act I quoted earlier.
This would be a massive project, there's no denying that, but of the kind that should also attract private capital, e.g. the pension funds. It is a classic example of where a Public-Private consortium, with the power of the Federal Legislation already on the books to mandate it's creation, and also (possibly with a court challenge, but also possibly highly-welcomed by CN/CP) the eventual exchange of the almost redundant freight track through the GTA as a like-for-like exchange, with provisos of course for temporal freight operations.
Even though it would be a massive project, it would actually *pay for itself*...easily...in many other ways, not the least saving the massive investments to upgrade many of the corridors that's now necessary for even *conditional* passenger operation. (Where freight still takes precedence, e.g. the north main.)
Bear in mind that the vast length of this link would be on property that the Province could...or would have to, make available (the Hydro One xmssn corridor).
