That’s part of why I am grinding the Kingston thing so much....whatever service is contemplated for that route post-HFR must also be break-even. Otherwise, the bureaucrats will swoop in and kill it.
One wonders if Ottawa and Ontario are both waiting for the other to pick up the cheque....I can see Ottawa declaring that the limit of its support extends to HFR 1.0 only, and any support for regional service west or east of Toronto is Ontario’s problem.
- Paul
@Urban Sky - Re the Lakeshore, I still see a contradiction between your vision (the Netherlands model) and what CN and Ottawa will allow. I agree that the NL vision might generate comparable ridership in Ontario, but is expensive and highly subsidised. The reality, as I predicted above, is that Ottawa will demand break even, and CN will want its track back. One can apply the data model you have offered, and predict additional ridership on the basis of population growth, improved and consistent offering for intermediate station pairs, and new pricing. However, CN will want to lower track speed (or demand additional compensation for maintaining the present); conflict with freight will remain and impact reliability; service between the longer station pairs (which generate the most revenue per ticket sold) will lose time competitiveness as intermediate stops are added. So there will be negatives and not just positives. At the end of the day, the local service will face all the same hurdles that cause VIA to want a separate route for HFR, while becoming harder to sustain with CN or generate public support.
I would predict a service pattern with no more than 5 trains each way Toronto-Kingston, maybe 3 of those continuing to Ottawa, two continuing to Montreal, and one being an overnight layover in Kingston in each direction (the pretend “hub”). Assume track speeds are lowered to 80 mph in line with what CN delivers Burlington-London. All trains making all stops. Equal CN antipathy and thus impediment from freight. Will that break even? If not, it isn’t sustainable. Will VIA have a public mandate and political and bureaucratic support and managerial bandwidth for a secondary service when HFR is sexier? Kingston will become the new Kitchener.
- Paul
Just to be sure: I never proposed the "Netherlands vision" as a template for the future Lakeshore service, I only mentioned it to show that in other countries, such a corridor would be considered a viable corridor even for very frequent service. Future service will certainly have a lower nominal train count, but as my table showed, much less than currently 17 trains per direction are needed to match the current frequencies offered to any of these cities (and especially between these intermediary cities).
As much as trying to predict the future from the past is a bad investment strategy, I find it the most promising strategy when anticipating how the federal government (and especially Transport Canada) would manage post-HFR VIA. Despite the favorite narrative of most "rail entusiasts" and self-declared "rail experts" in this country, VIA's history is not dominated by cuts and decline. Granted, its first 15 years of existance saw a consolidation (mostly by rationalizing the overlapping CN and CP networks) in 1976-1979 and then some cuts in 1981 (partly reversed in 1985) and of course the devastating cuts in 1990. However, since 1990, VIA's network has been remarkably stable and seen considerable growth in the Corridor (just look at QBEC-MTRL, MTRL-OTTW and OTTW-TRTO, which all grew from 3 trains per day to 5, 6 and 10 trains today). In fact, all five routes which disappeared in the last 30 years (the Atlantic, the Chaleau, Senneterre-Cochrane, Pukatawagan-Lynn Lake, Victoria-Courtenay) were lost due to infrastructure issues (and we are not talking about the downgrade-to-80-rather-than-100-mph category).
In the same way, the frequencies the federal government has allowed VIA to offer seem to generally respect the "minimum frequencies" outlined in Schedule 1 of the
legislature enacting the 1990-01-15 cuts, which happen to match the January 1990 timetable. Besides the once-weekly mixed train Wabowden-Churchill and the third frequency of the The Pas-Pukatawagan train, all routes continue to operate at frequencies which respect the "minimum frquencies" I just mentioned. The only rupture were the 2012 cuts, when the federal government imposed a budget cut onto VIA, but gave VIA the liberty to decide where these cuts would do the least damage, which reduced the frequencies offered between London&Sarnia, Toronto&Niagara Falls and (during winter only) on the Canadian below the 1990 levels:
Note: service levels below those of 1990 are highlighted in orange (when caused by infrastructure issues) or yellow (when caused by funding cuts)
Apart from the 1990 cuts, the federal government's approach to VIA seems to have been "the status quo with limited incremental changes" and it is not surprising that this has also become VIA's own approach during the last decades (one just needs to recall the obscure
Friday-only stop of train 26 in Coteau, which has survived since 1992 in VIA's schedules...). Therefore, I am not exactly sure why people here seem to expect that the federal government would abandon its commitment towards the people in Port Hope, Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Cobourg (which collectively account for 400,000 people) the moment HFR gets introduced. That of course doesn't guarantee current service levels, but I would again look at the 1990 levels as an indication of what Ottawa might be considering a "minimum service" (and again, except for two short periods in Smiths Falls and Trenton Junction, the number of trains stopping at a given station has never fallen below the 1990 levels):
All of this does of course not replace a firm indication from the government of what kind of service it would support along the Kingston Subdivision (if you insist that it wouldn't recover its direct costs). Nevertheless, in absence of such indications, I believe that past behavior is the best guidance we have for now to make such predictions...
@Urban Sky
Any thoughts on Paul's points?
Is HFR actually feasible on CN's Lakeshore corridor? Would triple tracking be required for the whole length? Is it even possible to mix long freight trains going that slow and get any speed gains for passenger trains out of it?
You would not just require separate tracks, but also the ROW owner ceding dispatching powers - over tracks laid on his lands...
Would the splitting of Ottawa and Montreal traffic on the Lakeshore corridor make it less attractive as a concept? Or does all the other local traffic compensate?
In my personal view, the only way to adequately serve the end-to-end markets (MTRL-OTTW, MTRL-TRTO, OTTW-TRTO) and the intermediary markets (anything from/to other stations) is to serve all end-to-end markets with one single service and all intermediary markets with a different service achieving the same. Anything else will either result in high operating costs or the large variety of hybrid trains we currently have and which struggle to serve any market adequately. If you fill out the following table with the frequencies for different hypothetical scenarios, we can have a deeper look at these trade-offs:
| From | via | To | Distance (km) | Scenario A | Scenario B | Scenario C |
|---|
| QBEC | TRIV | MTRL | 277 | | | |
| QBEC | DRMV | MTRL | 272 | | | |
| MTRL | ALEX | OTTW | 187 | | | |
| MTRL | CWLL | KGON | 285 | | | |
| OTTW | SMTF | KGON | 192 | | | |
| KGON | | TRTO | 254 | | | |
| OTTW | P'boro | TRTO | 400 | | | |
