lenaitch
Senior Member
Ok, a bit of pendant. The riding of Sudbury is essentially the old city (urban core of Greater Sudbury), but Nickle Belt covers the rest of Greater Sudbury. It's an easy mistake - you never hear from the Sudbury member.
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Lack of meaningful Passenger Rail service outside the Quebec-Windsor Corridor
- Thread starter Urban Sky
- Start date
micheal_can
Senior Member
Sorry, I couldn't resist. People like to be pedantic to me.
Actually, it was more of a "does this person know exactly where I live?"
lenaitch
Senior Member
You keep championing rail service to Sudbury, so it was a guess. Maybe you've said where you live; I don't know and it doesn't really matter.
micheal_can
Senior Member
Jamie West is Sudbury's MPP. The 2 ridings that comprise the city of Greater Sudbury are both NDP provincially.
Wm Perkins Bull
Active Member
My gut says 4 buses per day is the minimum number necessary to even consider studying the feasibility of implementing a train. Ontario needs so much more rural bus service, the situation right now is quite bleak.
A route that I think has a solid near term business case is extending the Barrie GO Line to Collingwood. I apologize if that suggestion is not appropriate for this thread due to being in Southern Ontario.
lenaitch
Senior Member
It has been discussed, on several threads. It has its backers. Higher initial capital costs. I'm not convinced a "near term" business case is there, but many are.
micheal_can
Senior Member
There should be GO buses to Colingwood, Orillia and Midland. I know some have said there is service to them, but it is not GO service, so for some commuters,it may be more of a challenge to use,which means they don't use it.
micheal_can
Senior Member
This was posted in the Via thread, and so not to have it go on a long tangent there,I will comment here more than what I posted there.
Currently, the Downeaster is a 5 times a day train to Brunswick ME. They could extend one of those to Halifax. They could also extend some of them to Bangor ME.
I posted:
Bringing back the Gull, which would be an extension of the existing Downeaster would be the most realistic of any of the cancelled non Corridor international trains. It serves a decent population base along the entire route with 2 major cities at each end.
Currently, the Downeaster is a 5 times a day train to Brunswick ME. They could extend one of those to Halifax. They could also extend some of them to Bangor ME.
dowlingm
Senior Member
A lot of this discussion hangs around a few specific destinations but we don’t really know for any level of government what actually constitutes good reason to run rail service. Some of the extant routes continue for seeming little reason other than they always have. Others are reinstated with “business cases” which are somehow different to the “business cases” to close them.
We see the hand wringing in Eastern Ontario for the loss of what amounts to a federally operated commuter service to Toronto while elsewhere we have seen the provincial commuter service to all intents compete with a federal one. What I’m saying is that everything on this thread will always be a matter of opinion because there is no transparent mechanism to plan service in this province or country, especially when private competing interests would rush to put their thumbs on the scale if any were to be proposed. In the case of the discussions above, I would have brought a reinstated Northlander no further than North Bay, but the part beyond North Bay seems most attractive to the government proponents for political reasons.
The one thing I do wonder about is why there are few mixed trains, such as Polar Bear. What are the limitations around operating such services, assuming that the freight was terminus to terminus or with a minimal amount of shunting. I guess they work best where the track owner and operator are the same entity over the entirety of the run, and where the timetable using freight rather than passenger maximum speeds is acceptable?
We see the hand wringing in Eastern Ontario for the loss of what amounts to a federally operated commuter service to Toronto while elsewhere we have seen the provincial commuter service to all intents compete with a federal one. What I’m saying is that everything on this thread will always be a matter of opinion because there is no transparent mechanism to plan service in this province or country, especially when private competing interests would rush to put their thumbs on the scale if any were to be proposed. In the case of the discussions above, I would have brought a reinstated Northlander no further than North Bay, but the part beyond North Bay seems most attractive to the government proponents for political reasons.
The one thing I do wonder about is why there are few mixed trains, such as Polar Bear. What are the limitations around operating such services, assuming that the freight was terminus to terminus or with a minimal amount of shunting. I guess they work best where the track owner and operator are the same entity over the entirety of the run, and where the timetable using freight rather than passenger maximum speeds is acceptable?
crs1026
Superstar
Lots of reasons. One is that passenger facilities may be away from freight shunting locations, and it just gets complicated running the trains to serve both. Leaving a passenger car unattended while crew do switching is no longer acceptable. Risk tolerance for passenger injury due to slack action, and potential contact with hazardous materials in an incident, has gone way down since the mixed trains disappeared. The nature of the freight business (which has trended away from single car shipments placed on team tracks or customer sidings) has changed, so a mixed train today might not be "pedding" cars to various individual smallish customers so much as pulling blocks of commodities from much larger customers.... again, different timings and wait time by passengers. We no longer tolerate dumping waste on the tracks, so now we need a passenger car with holding tanks and a facility to empty these. The cars themselves need to be more complex - the open windows for ventilation and pot bellied stove or oil stove in the old combines for heating is not an acceptable level of passenger amenity - so maintenance needs may be different. The crew responsibilities and due diligence are much different - a freight operator will likely not accept the work to train crews for passenger handling, emergency procedures, etc - and the operational division of duties would be an added complication. Railways have changed their practices re local freight service, such that running local trains to a precise schedule is no longer the norm.... local trains are run only when necessary and customers often wait days for service, unlike the old mixed trains which came on a timetable on regular days of operation.
The big tilt that killed many local passenger trains (which ridership had abandoned long before the trains stopped running) was the loss of mail and express business. The mixed trains that we look back on were actually dinosaurs long before they disappeared, and are not effective ways of moving people or goods in today's world. Other than in extremely isolated areas I can't imagine how one would justify bringing them back. A bus and a Fedex van will do a much better job anywhere there is a road.
- Paul
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lenaitch
Senior Member
^^ To add, most freight revenue these days is long distance running between a few major yards that are often nowhere near when passengers want to go. Switcher service that fills in the customers between those yards are fewer and farther between except perhaps in the prairies, and can start and end at the same terminus without touching another significant community. A mixed would also require a power car.
The ONR operates them for obvious reasons - it's the only terrestrial way to get anything to and from Moosonee. Otherwise, they would have to run separate trains, which would be a logistical problem for those travelling with their vehicle. I don't know if they are still running in northern Manitoba and eastern Quebec.
The ONR operates them for obvious reasons - it's the only terrestrial way to get anything to and from Moosonee. Otherwise, they would have to run separate trains, which would be a logistical problem for those travelling with their vehicle. I don't know if they are still running in northern Manitoba and eastern Quebec.
micheal_can
Senior Member
What you speak of is the nature of the beast that is a crown corporation. The cuts were more political than practical. If we were to look at it purely financial, I'd bet that we would still have the southern Canadian running.
The only way to have brought back the Northlander just to North Bay would have been through Via. That is because south of North bay it is not ONR tracks.
If you look at the routes they run, they tend to run on routes that are not connected to the highway network. Because of that, everyone must go by any way possible. So, if a train goes there, putting a few passenger cars and box cars together makes sense.
dowlingm
Senior Member
And that is exactly how I would have done it - for VIA to operate it, for reasons previously stated in the Northlander thread
micheal_can
Senior Member
The problem is, Via has no desire to expand their service.
dowlingm
Senior Member
I didn’t say they would do it out of the good of their hearts. Ontario will be paying a decent sum to have ONR run down there - my guess is that VIA could do the run for less given their economies of scale, especially if the remaining $ were put into removing TSRs on the CN Newmarket. But the decision is already taken. In any case it reflects my thinking on expansion - take existing hubs and expand them rather than throw money at relatively isolated routes and operations, until you can create new hubs further out from increased regional activity