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Ontario Northland/Northern Ontario Transportation

micheal_can said:
There was concern that had they been able to, that OVR would have been making more money by hauling the cross Canada freight.
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Imagine if (assuming the above is correct) we managed road building by a determination of which trucking company would be advantaged by one route to the other...
 
micheal_can said:
There was concern that had they been able to, that OVR would have been making more money by hauling the cross Canada freight.
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dowlingm said:
Imagine if (assuming the above is correct) we managed road building by a determination of which trucking company would be advantaged by one route to the other...
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It's private property. Within regulatory frameworks, they are free to build, close, lease, manage etc. their infrastructure as they see fit.

If the CP Ottawa valley route was profitable, they probably wouldn't have leased it out in the first place. Most of the tonnage east of Mattawa was bridge (through) CP traffic that they decided they could run through S. Ontario cheaper.

Nobody seems to be beating up on CN for abandoning their Valley route. Too old in popular memory (1997) perhaps.
 
lenaitch said:
It's private property. Within regulatory frameworks, they are free to build, close, lease, manage etc. their infrastructure as they see fit.

If the CP Ottawa valley route was profitable, they probably wouldn't have leased it out in the first place. Most of the tonnage east of Mattawa was bridge (through) CP traffic that they decided they could run through S. Ontario cheaper.

Nobody seems to be beating up on CN for abandoning their Valley route. Too old in popular memory (1997) perhaps.
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Yes, it's private property. Which means decisions are taken short term in order to shave dollars off P+L, like reducing property tax to host municipalities and discarding track beds and trestles bowed under the weight of deferred maintenance. Like I said, this rarely happens with roads regardless of economic ebbs and flows.

A combination of the CN north/west of Pembroke and the CP route south of it in the hands of ONR would bypass the OVR as sole gatekeepers (and offer the potential of a "GO" train for Ottawa and continued work for Thunder Bay) but I suppose there are many in environmental lobbies who weren't sad to see goods trains out of Algonquin Park.
 
dowlingm said:
Yes, it's private property. Which means decisions are taken short term in order to shave dollars off P+L, like reducing property tax to host municipalities and discarding track beds and trestles bowed under the weight of deferred maintenance. Like I said, this rarely happens with roads regardless of economic ebbs and flows.

A combination of the CN north/west of Pembroke and the CP route south of it in the hands of ONR would bypass the OVR as sole gatekeepers (and offer the potential of a "GO" train for Ottawa and continued work for Thunder Bay) but I suppose there are many in environmental lobbies who weren't sad to see goods trains out of Algonquin Park.
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What is wrong with one line through the Ottawa valley?
 
micheal_can said:
What is wrong with one line through the Ottawa valley?
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The CP Pembroke-Mattawa trackage is a bit winding and would not provide any route between the west and Ottawa/East that doesn't run over OVR at some point. The Beachburg south of Pembroke would mean involving another province and thus more reasons for nothing to happen.
 
micheal_can said:
What is wrong with one line through the Ottawa valley?
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Nothing, so long as it is profitable for the company that owns it, and apparently they were not. If the federal government or province wanted to railbank it/them for future passenger use (because it seems they were determined to have no freight value), I suppose they could have either bought it/them or paid the companies to keep it/them. There are a number of abandoned ROWs in the province that, in today's context, could be argued have a current or future public benefit, but unless we are willing to nationalize our railways, those decisions were based on economic viability for the owners.
 
lrt's friend said:
The CN route went through Algonquin Park and park officials wanted it out of there. That is why that route was abandoned first.
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While that certainly didn't hurt the cause, that wasn't the primary reason why they pulled that section of track.

That line was a bridge route, and had no on-line traffic. Therefore it was felt that it would be more advantageous to reroute trains via the Toronto area, where the capacity existed and for which the tracks were never going to be abandoned.

Dan
 
I'm not sure there was much opposition to CN's abandonment north of Pembroke, but that was 25 years ago. There was some opposition to the later abandonment of the remainder from Ottawa to Pembroke, and it was leased to Ottawa Central for a time but CN bought them out and later abandoned it. Local interests and municipalities wanted to buy it but apparently couldn't afford it and/of convince lenders of the economic viability.
 
lenaitch said:
I'm not sure there was much opposition to CN's abandonment north of Pembroke, but that was 25 years ago. There was some opposition to the later abandonment of the remainder from Ottawa to Pembroke, and it was leased to Ottawa Central for a time but CN bought them out and later abandoned it. Local interests and municipalities wanted to buy it but apparently couldn't afford it and/of convince lenders of the economic viability.
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The last major customer, a paper mill on the Quebec side, closed. There were no important customers left for CN or CP in Renfrew County. Sadly, they couldn't work together on a joint bridge route, but then again, they jointly owned the Canada Southern Railway between Fort Erie and Windsor after purchasing from Conrail in the 1980s, and it is now entirely gone.
 
lenaitch said:
Nothing, so long as it is profitable for the company that owns it, and apparently they were not. If the federal government or province wanted to railbank it/them for future passenger use (because it seems they were determined to have no freight value), I suppose they could have either bought it/them or paid the companies to keep it/them. There are a number of abandoned ROWs in the province that, in today's context, could be argued have a current or future public benefit, but unless we are willing to nationalize our railways, those decisions were based on economic viability for the owners.
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HCR isn't profitable yet it is still there.
 
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