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General railway discussions

Well............hmmm...........the U.S. Department of Justice doesn't seem overly pleased with CN right off the bat....

www.thestar.com

CP Rail stands by bid for KCS as U.S. Justice Department opposes CN voting trust

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. remains confident that its proposal to acquire Kansas City Southern will succeed without the need to increase its bid after the U.S. Justice Department came out against Canadian National Railway Co.’s use of a voting trust in its rival offer that the U.S. railway...
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com

As well capitalized as CN is...........I'm not sure I understand this play. I thought I did...........(goad CP into overpaying)..........

But.....it (CN) has agreed to absorb a 700M break-up fee to CP as part of its offer..............on top of which, it has agreed to pay another 1B should the U.S. gov't turn down the takeover.........

Which seems a very real possibility.

In which case, KCS only real suitor will be CP, which would effectively collect the entire 1.7B; and that is if they hold to their original offer.

Should their only serious competitive bidder be out of the picture.............I could see the offer being lowered.
 
^yeah, I thought it was a cynical play to get CP to pay more. But here there's the obvious risk of outbidding your rival and being on the hook for the massive deal. I guess we underestimated CN's willingness to acquire KCS. They must have genuinely wanted it; probably had the ground work done and binding their time until a moment like this came along.
 
UrbanJon said:
1) I struggle to think of any branch line not around today that would be of much use. Take for example the lines to Grey/Bruce, what uses would they be of today or in the future, transit or otherwise? What about Lindsay?

2) It could be argued that the alignment chosen for HFR is a poor one, existing only because of a lack of political will to build a proper intercity right of way. Also, the lines like the OBRY will be turned into trails, so the new usage aspect is certainly covered.

3) While the BCRY is often brought up in Barrie Line discussions, an extension to Collingwood is the furthest thing from viable and will never happen. Its population and potential travel market is very small, and given the state of the RoW, trying to resume service would probably cost the same as establishing a brand new corridor.

4) This could be solved with good planning. Ontario has lots of underused land near rail corridors. An easy solution could be to zone more land adjacent to rail corridors for industrial usage and help to relocate industries to rail served site if requested.

5) Branch lines aren't redundancy, they are auxiliary. Advocates of better bus service should be wary of efforts to preserve branch lines for the purposes of GO service as these efforts will ultimately expend resources for what will ultimately be an inferior service, as seen between Cambridge and Guelph.
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1) Fair enough, many rural rail corridors are awful. I found a kml file of former rail corridors in ON/QC. This is what the OBRY area looks like:
1621214686173.png

Awful corridors.

2) But it's better than nothing. And rural corridors can always be improved, relatively easily.

3) A summer train to Wasaga/winter train to Blue Mountain could be viable. I agree that frequent bus service is probably a better solution, but let's keep the corridor just in case.

4) Indeed.

5) I would say that rail service comes after bus service is proven to be successful. Using rail to stimulate demand is putting the cart in front of the horse; corridors are hard to find in semi-urban/urban areas. Which is why I am opposed* to converting the OBRY into a trail. I'm looking at the GO trip times from Cambridge to Union Station, which is over 2 1/2 hours in rush hour. That's ridiculous; Kitchener to Union is 50 minutes shorter.

*The OBRY in Brampton can still be used as it's a relatively straight corridor. Rail trails are hard to convert back into railroads, which is why I'm opposed.
 
I would imagine one of the big costs to any new ROW, as opposed to rehabilitating old, is real estate. Even with old ROWs, the ownership may well have since been broken up to local owners. Most of the southern Ontario rail network was built to late 1800s standards and technology. Even a pax service to Collingwood only gets you the east side of town; to buy up the rest from developers (those parcels not already built on or have site plan approval) would be horribly expensive, as would any new line to the beach.
 
lenaitch said:
I would imagine one of the big costs to any new ROW, as opposed to rehabilitating old, is real estate. Even with old ROWs, the ownership may well have since been broken up to local owners. Most of the southern Ontario rail network was built to late 1800s standards and technology. Even a pax service to Collingwood only gets you the east side of town; to buy up the rest from developers (those parcels not already built on or have site plan approval) would be horribly expensive, as would any new line to the beach.
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar enough w/Collingwood/Blue Mountain to intelligently comment on that; I would say, Real Estate near Wasaga is surprisingly cheap (by Toronto standards}; in either case, the art is recovering costs through over-acquisition in key spots, and developing/flipping after delivering the rail link.
 
Northern Light said:
I'm not familiar enough w/Collingwood/Blue Mountain to intelligently comment on that; I would say, Real Estate near Wasaga is surprisingly cheap (by Toronto standards}; in either case, the art is recovering costs through over-acquisition in key spots, and developing/flipping after delivering the rail link.
Click to expand...

Clearly cheaper than Toronto (what isn't?). When land acquisition is at fair market value, I suppose anything is possible with a big enough chequebook and taxpayers willing to fund the bank account.
 
lenaitch said:
Clearly cheaper than Toronto (what isn't?). When land acquisition is at fair market value, I suppose anything is possible with a big enough chequebook and taxpayers willing to fund the bank account.
Click to expand...

I have no desire to see a massive loss here; but I also am unprepared to feel guilt over some acquisition costs that no one blinks an eye at for a major highway extension.

This idea being much smaller in scale (and cost) by comparison.

We'd need to a study to get the details right (last mile connection could always be a bus); the overall object being to create a more ecologically sensible and ideally more timely travel option than could be achieved by car.
 
While the earlier post discussed a general comment on Toronto area/southern Ontario remaining and former branch lines, since we've grabbed onto the BCR, I think one thing that should be considered is the market for a rail connection between Collingwood/Wasaga Beach and points beyond. Some seem to envision a commuter-level service, or at least something approaching it. My sense is that any commuter need, should one exist, would be more flexibly and cheaper served by better bus service to connect to GO Allendale and/or Barrie Transit. I'm not sure there is, or will be, much of a market for rail halfways frequent service between this area and the GTA (between C'Wood/WB and Barrie - more likely).

If it is to serve seasonal recreational needs, it seems to speak of a bit of a dichotomy and, by some, distain, for matters rural except as it serves recreational needs. Consider that there are no longer 'ski trains' to Whistler and, as far as known, the Quebec Charlevoix region.
 
lenaitch said:
While the earlier post discussed a general comment on Toronto area/southern Ontario remaining and former branch lines, since we've grabbed onto the BCR, I think one thing that should be considered is the market for a rail connection between Collingwood/Wasaga Beach and points beyond. Some seem to envision a commuter-level service, or at least something approaching it. My sense is that any commuter need, should one exist, would be more flexibly and cheaper served by better bus service to connect to GO Allendale and/or Barrie Transit. I'm not sure there is, or will be, much of a market for rail halfways frequent service between this area and the GTA (between C'Wood/WB and Barrie - more likely).

If it is to serve seasonal recreational needs, it seems to speak of a bit of a dichotomy and, by some, distain, for matters rural except as it serves recreational needs. Consider that there are no longer 'ski trains' to Whistler and, as far as known, the Quebec Charlevoix region.
Click to expand...
Lets start with 30 Minute Bus service from Barrie GO? And then there could be local and express services where the LINK bus is like the local service and the GO Bus could stop at major stops.
The bus should continue to Owensound, and then there should be a different bus that takes Highway 6 from Guelph or Brampton to Orangeville and them on to Owensound.
 
lenaitch said:
While the earlier post discussed a general comment on Toronto area/southern Ontario remaining and former branch lines, since we've grabbed onto the BCR, I think one thing that should be considered is the market for a rail connection between Collingwood/Wasaga Beach and points beyond. Some seem to envision a commuter-level service, or at least something approaching it. My sense is that any commuter need, should one exist, would be more flexibly and cheaper served by better bus service to connect to GO Allendale and/or Barrie Transit. I'm not sure there is, or will be, much of a market for rail halfways frequent service between this area and the GTA (between C'Wood/WB and Barrie - more likely).
Click to expand...

I agree that any commuter need is probably better served by bus, in so far as that need for any number is people commuting to Barrie.

I honestly hope very few people would commute Wasaga/Collingwood to Toronto daily.

lenaitch said:
...... Consider that there are no longer 'ski trains' to Whistler and, as far as known, the Quebec Charlevoix region.
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This is true; of course, its also true that the Golden Horseshoe is much more populated than greater Montreal or Vancouver; meaning greater potential market size.

A further consideration is that right now, no 400-series highway passes particularly close to this area, I sincerely hope one never does.

The local roads in their current configuration are close to maxed out.

****

Also worth noting VIA is seriously looking at adding train service to serve the Calgary-Banff market which I would see as quite comparable in terms of City to Recreation/Tourist area.
 
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