VIA Rail

[kingkam]

This is just a general comment and I'll post in other threads too as some of these comments are not relevant here...and I just want to vent.

The passenger rail service is dying in Canada.There is just too many significant flaws with the way we run our systems.The pandemic is going to amplify this even more. Especially with GO/VIA service.

We need High Speed Electrified Rail linking major business centers together like Kitchener, London, Windsor, Hamilton, Kingston, Ottawa and MTL.(will never happen just be talked about for the next 15-20 years)
We need to offer price points that actually make sense for people to ditch their car and take rail service to places like above
We need a mid town corridor running through the GTA parallel to the 407 or 401
We need to significantly reduce the travel time linking the above cities by at least half.

As an example I would love to take the train from let's say Whitby to Burlington/Oakville but that takes 2+ hours by GO. Or I would love to take the train from Union to Niagara but that's another 2 hours again. So we need passenger trains that can travel 200 + KM/H that don't get delayed by freight or ROW's. This makes me just want to use my vehicle even if it means it's more taxing on my body.

We have an opportunity to significantly invest in our economy right now and we should take advantage in the post pandemic world. Having high speed trains opens up where people can live/work/play and links our province together. I know it will never happen but one can dream. The passenger rail service will take years to recover unless we invest and actually make it a faster/cheaper viable option within our option to use.

Someone smarter than me prove me wrong or am I correct?

 

[micheal_can]

This is just a general comment and I'll post in other threads too as some of these comments are not relevant here...and I just want to vent.

The passenger rail service is dying in Canada.There is just too many significant flaws with the way we run our systems.The pandemic is going to amplify this even more. Especially with GO/VIA service.

We need High Speed Electrified Rail linking major business centers together like Kitchener, London, Windsor, Hamilton, Kingston, Ottawa and MTL.(will never happen just be talked about for the next 15-20 years)
We need to offer price points that actually make sense for people to ditch their car and take rail service to places like above
We need a mid town corridor running through the GTA parallel to the 407 or 401
We need to significantly reduce the travel time linking the above cities by at least half.

As an example I would love to take the train from let's say Whitby to Burlington/Oakville but that takes 2+ hours by GO. Or I would love to take the train from Union to Niagara but that's another 2 hours again. So we need passenger trains that can travel 200 + KM/H that don't get delayed by freight or ROW's. This makes me just want to use my vehicle even if it means it's more taxing on my body.

We have an opportunity to significantly invest in our economy right now and we should take advantage in the post pandemic world. Having high speed trains opens up where people can live/work/play and links our province together. I know it will never happen but one can dream. The passenger rail service will take years to recover unless we invest and actually make it a faster/cheaper viable option within our option to use.

Someone smarter than me prove me wrong or am I correct?

The problem with GO is that they generally stop at all stations, where as, Via only stops at a handful of stations along the same route. If I were you, I'd take the GO to Oshawa, Then take Via to Toronto, and then take Via to Niagara Falls, if it were running.

 

[Urban Sky]

Someone smarter than me prove me wrong or am I correct?

It’s good to have dreams, but it’s better to have a strategic vision of how to achieve it. Everything you describe should happen eventually at some point in the future, but HFR is the indispensable first step in that direction...

 

[SaugeenJunction]

It’s good to have dreams, but it’s better to have a strategic vision of how to achieve it. Everything you describe should happen eventually at some point in the future, but HFR is the indispensable first step in that direction...

HFR is excellent because it will create a consistent and frequent service which will help grow ridership in big ways. Once the train culture and ridership is there, then it will be politically palatable to drop the big bucks on HSR. I am all for high speed rail but I think that for Canada, baby steps is the best strategy.

 

[Allandale25]

I know we previously had some questions about how closely Metrolinx and VIA were coordinating on infrastructure planning for HFR, and this answer on Metrolinx Engage seems to clarify that they’re talking, which is good.

View attachment 287850

Maybe this is just a wording issue but I'm not why they are saying the JPO "is" being established. Hasn't it been up and running since it was announced in January 2020? What's the link for that response location?

 

[kEiThZ]

We need High Speed Electrified Rail linking major business centers together like Kitchener, London, Windsor, Hamilton, Kingston, Ottawa and MTL.(will never happen just be talked about for the next 15-20 years)
We need to offer price points that actually make sense for people to ditch their car and take rail service to places like above
We need a mid town corridor running through the GTA parallel to the 407 or 401
We need to significantly reduce the travel time linking the above cities by at least half.

You need to better distinguish between what we "need" and "want". High Speed Rail is a nice to have. It's not absolutely necessary. As we're seeing during this pandemic, intercity travel is less necessary than we previously thought. All this is to say that insisting that we need the best infrastructure outcome is exactly what has been screwing us over and not actually getting anything built. I'll be quite happy with getting VIA's Dedicated Tracks project built because it will make VIA a lot more viable, will somewhat improve intercity travel and finally make it easier to convince the broader public of the need for more investment in intercity rail. This is the process undertaken by so many European and Asian countries decades ago. They didn't all start out building high speed electrified rail from scratch. They upgraded existing lines or built new ones because of demand. Our mistake has always been insisting that we should have high speed rail immediately. Imagine where we'd be today if we simply built a dedicated intercity rail line a decade or two ago.

 

[kEiThZ]

Maybe this is just a wording issue but I'm not why they are saying the JPO "is" being established. Hasn't it been up and running since it was announced in January 2020? What's the link for that response location?

It's PR blather. I wouldn't make much of it. It's a pretty boilerplate response.

What we need is that JPO report that Ms Gagnon hinted would be out soon.

 

[tmlittle]

HFR is excellent because it will create a consistent and frequent service which will help grow ridership in big ways. Once the train culture and ridership is there, then it will be politically palatable to drop the big bucks on HSR. I am all for high speed rail but I think that for Canada, baby steps is the best strategy.

This is one of the reasons why I think moves like the intercommunity bus routes in SWO are so important. A lot of them are clearly meant in part to be connectors for Via service, and especially outside of metropoles there really needs to be deliberate effort to set up these feeders and raise ridership.

 

[crs1026]

We have an opportunity to significantly invest in our economy right now and we should take advantage in the post pandemic world. Having high speed trains opens up where people can live/work/play and links our province together. I know it will never happen but one can dream. The passenger rail service will take years to recover unless we invest and actually make it a faster/cheaper viable option within our option to use.

While I agree that we could move faster, and further, I’m not sure the public would agree.To implement all the ideas you cite, the capital investment would be enormous. A government doing all that would likely be received as “spending like drunken sailors”. And we enthusiasts may underestimate how big a hit VIA took reputationally when the 2008-2009 Kingston Sub triple tracking project spent money badly.

To be able to put more elaborate proposals on the table, VIA first needs a success story that generates public appetite to invest further. Despite its limitations, I do believe HFR can do that.

It will be interesting to see whether there is an appetite post-COVID for investment beyond Ontario-Quebec. The proposal for a Banff Calgary service seems to be getting favourable reaction, but the same amount of money could build a Calgary Edmonton line carrying far more people. VIA has indicated that any expansion in the Maritimes requires substantial investment in track. Perhaps people will have more interest in infrastructure spending as part of the COVID recovery, but many will still wait to see if HFR succeeds.

I know we previously had some questions about how closely Metrolinx and VIA were coordinating on infrastructure planning for HFR, and this answer on Metrolinx Engage seems to clarify that they’re talking, which is good.

I read that reply by ML to say “we have told VIA what we are doing, and if they don’t like it the ball is in their court”.

A layover yard is not that big an investment. If VIA insists on using this route, moving the layover area for three GO trains to somewhere else is not that big a deal. (Hint: three trains would fit on the north side of Exhibition Station). But if VIA is happy with the Stouffville-Scarboro Jct routing, the Don line may not be worth the squabble.

- Paul

 

[micheal_can]

You need to better distinguish between what we "need" and "want". High Speed Rail is a nice to have. It's not absolutely necessary. As we're seeing during this pandemic, intercity travel is less necessary than we previously thought. All this is to say that insisting that we need the best infrastructure outcome is exactly what has been screwing us over and not actually getting anything built. I'll be quite happy with getting VIA's Dedicated Tracks project built because it will make VIA a lot more viable, will somewhat improve intercity travel and finally make it easier to convince the broader public of the need for more investment in intercity rail. This is the process undertaken by so many European and Asian countries decades ago. They didn't all start out building high speed electrified rail from scratch. They upgraded existing lines or built new ones because of demand. Our mistake has always been insisting that we should have high speed rail immediately. Imagine where we'd be today if we simply built a dedicated intercity rail line a decade or two ago.

Japan built their HSR in the recovery after a nuclear explosion. I don't think a nuclear explosion is needed, but after a pandemic, I wish that the government looks to their public transit services and put more there than private corporations. Just imagine the recovery having a HSR line that goes Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. That distance could be done in about 2 hours. If electrified in the provinces that are mainly powered by Nuclear (ON) and Hydroelectricity (QC), it would help them reach their Paris Accord targets much easier.

Alas, the government doesn't have the vision to do that, so they will prop up the airline industry, yet again.

 

[Urban Sky]

Japan built their HSR in the recovery after a nuclear explosion.

For those commenters here who are evidently overwhelmed with doing a simple internet research on Wikipedia to prevent them from making wildly incorrect claims:

The name "Shinkansen" to express the idea of a standard-gauge rail network in Japan was first used in 1940 (thus 5 years before the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

The construction of the first segment of the Shinkansen network was approved by the Japanese government in 1958 (thus 13 years after the nuclear explosions).

Therefore, the economic recovery was what brought the legacy rail network to its capacity limits and thus created the case to build HSR, not the other way around...

Spoiler

Early proposals[edit]
The popular English name bullet train is a literal translation of the Japanese term dangan ressha (弾丸列車), a nickname given to the project while it was initially discussed in the 1930s. The name stuck because of the original 0 Series Shinkansen's resemblance to a bullet and its high speed.

The Shinkansen name was first formally used in 1940 for a proposed standard gauge passenger and freight line between Tokyo and Shimonoseki that would have used steam and electric locomotives with a top speed of 200 km/h (120 mph). Over the next three years, the Ministry of Railways drew up more ambitious plans to extend the line to Beijing (through a tunnel to Korea) and even Singapore, and build connections to the Trans-Siberian Railway and other trunk lines in Asia. These plans were abandoned in 1943 as Japan's position in World War II worsened. However, some construction did commence on the line; several tunnels on the present-day Shinkansen date to the war-era project.

Construction[edit]
Following the end of World War II, high-speed rail was forgotten for several years while traffic of passengers and freight steadily increased on the conventional Tōkaidō Main Line along with the reconstruction of Japanese industry and economy. By the mid-1950s the Tōkaidō Line was operating at full capacity, and the Ministry of Railways decided to revisit the Shinkansen project. In 1957, Odakyu Electric Railway introduced its 3000 series SE Romancecar train, setting a world speed record of 145 km/h (90 mph) for a narrow gauge train. This train gave designers the confidence that they could safely build an even faster standard gauge train. Thus the first Shinkansen, the 0 series, was built on the success of the Romancecar.

In the 1950s, the Japanese national attitude was that railways would soon be outdated and replaced by air travel and highways as in America and many countries in Europe. However, Shinji Sogō, President of Japanese National Railways, insisted strongly on the possibility of high-speed rail, and the Shinkansen project was implemented.

Government approval came in December 1958, and construction of the first segment of the Tōkaidō Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka started in April 1959. The cost of constructing the Shinkansen was at first estimated at nearly 200 billion yen, which was raised in the form of a government loan, railway bonds and a low-interest loan of US$80 million from the World Bank. Initial estimates, however, were deliberately understated and the actual cost was about 400 billion yen. As the budget shortfall became clear in 1963, Sogo resigned to take responsibility.[16]

A test facility for rolling stock, now part of the line, opened in Odawara in 1962.

 

[kEiThZ]

Japan built their HSR in the recovery after a nuclear explosion.

The first Shinkansen line started construction in 1958 and opened in 1964 (19 years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It ran between Tokyo and Osaka. Nowhere near Hiroshima (280 km from Osaka) and Nagasaki (550 km from Osaka). This would be like building a rail line from Toronto to Montreal to compensate for earthquakes in London and Windsor two decades earlier. So no, they didn't build the line as part of some kind of recovery effort. Like Europe, they built it because the main lines were maxing out on capacity.

Japan also had (and still has) congested airspace and limited airport capacity. They used 747s (and 777s today) for domestic short-haul flights. Imagine taking a 777 from Toronto to Montreal or Winnipeg as the norm. The only real way to add substantial intercity travel capacity was high speed rail.

Should be mentioned too that the construction of Japan's HSR network basically bankrupted the national rail operator resulting in a massive government bailout and privatization. They still have over ¥20 trillion to pay off. That's about CA$240B. If we had even 1% of that kind of financial mess here, the government would simply shut VIA down.

 

[reaperexpress]

This is just a general comment and I'll post in other threads too as some of these comments are not relevant here...and I just want to vent.

The passenger rail service is dying in Canada.There is just too many significant flaws with the way we run our systems.The pandemic is going to amplify this even more. Especially with GO/VIA service.

We need High Speed Electrified Rail linking major business centers together like Kitchener, London, Windsor, Hamilton, Kingston, Ottawa and MTL.(will never happen just be talked about for the next 15-20 years)
We need to offer price points that actually make sense for people to ditch their car and take rail service to places like above
We need a mid town corridor running through the GTA parallel to the 407 or 401
We need to significantly reduce the travel time linking the above cities by at least half.

As an example I would love to take the train from let's say Whitby to Burlington/Oakville but that takes 2+ hours by GO. Or I would love to take the train from Union to Niagara but that's another 2 hours again. So we need passenger trains that can travel 200 + KM/H that don't get delayed by freight or ROW's. This makes me just want to use my vehicle even if it means it's more taxing on my body.

We have an opportunity to significantly invest in our economy right now and we should take advantage in the post pandemic world. Having high speed trains opens up where people can live/work/play and links our province together. I know it will never happen but one can dream. The passenger rail service will take years to recover unless we invest and actually make it a faster/cheaper viable option within our option to use.

Someone smarter than me prove me wrong or am I correct?

I suppose venting could be a way to release your frustrations, but a better way would be to research the thing you're frustrated about and identify ways you can contribute to the outcome you envision.

Passenger Rail service is not uniformly dying in Canada. Yes, long-distance VIA services have been on life-support since the late 70's, and many intercity routes are tenuous due to the awkward financial/commercial relationship between CN and VIA, but passenger rail has been experiencing incredible growth in Southern Ontario, primarily in the form of commuter rail, but also to a lesser extent in the Toronto-Ottawa VIA service.

The GO Expansion program is an absolutely enormous project that will bring frequent electrified service to the central portions of the GO network, and all-day express service to more distant destinations such as Kitchener, Niagara Falls and Barrie. This is not just talk, this has already been underway for a decade and the results are starting to show. I have been summarizing commuter rail schedules for the past 5 years, and between January 2015 and January 2020 the number of weekly GO train trips more than doubled from 1486 to 3472. In January 2015, only the Lakeshore lines had all-day service, with service every 30 minutes. By January 2020 there was all-day service on the Lakeshore Lines (every 15 minutes midday and every 30 minutes other times), UP Express (every 15 minutes), Kitchener line (every 60 minutes), Barrie Line (every 60 minutes) and Stouffville line (every 60 minutes). Every one of these service expansions was made possible thanks to railway expansions. Some have been huge projects, such as the Georgetown South project which completely grade-separated the Kitchener corridor east of Pearson airport and doubled the width of the infrastructure to support 4 tracks (widening to 8 tracks as the Milton and Barrie lines join in). While others have been comparatively modest, such as the projects to add double-track segments on the Barrie and Stouffville lines.

At the moment, the focus has been on introducing a base layer of local train service, so off-peak travel times have not really improved. But the next step will be to introduce some all-day regional train services, which will stop at fewer stations and achieve much higher average speeds than their corresponding local services. These services can cruise at 150 km/h, which is easily fast enough to provide very competitive travel times to destinations such as Niagara Falls and Kitchener. The only regional service which currently exists is the weekend Niagara train, though it only has 4 round trips per day and its travel times are severely limited by the 50 km/h speed limit through Hamilton and 105 km/h speed limit between Hamilton and Niagara. The next service to be introduced will be an all-day service to Hamilton (probably West Harbour), thanks to a track expansion project that Metrolinx and CN are undertaking in Hamilton. Next will be all-day hourly service to Kitchener, thanks to a Metrolinx track expansion project underway between Kitchener and Georgetown which will finally introduce passing sidings to allow bidirectional service.

As mentioned by others, VIA is hoping to revolutionize its business process through the HFR project, which would give them much more control over their own operations, and thereby vastly improve service frequency and reliability.

Of course the coronavirus pandemic has been a major setback to rail travel, and some of the changes are likely here to stay, such as the increase in telecommuting and associated reduction in peak-period commuter demand to and from office centres. The good news though is that GO's expansion program happens to already match up with the market segments which are comparatively unaffected, namely off-peak travel and longer-distance commuting.

The bottom line is that if you as a citizen want to maximize your impact on improving passenger rail in Canada, your best bet is to actively support railway improvement projects such as VIA's HFR, and Metrolinx's GO Expansion. These projects commonly face political opposition from residents near the railways, so it is important to also have political support from rail travellers and potential travellers to balance this out and reduce the chance of those projects being cancelled or watered down.

 

[micheal_can]

The first Shinkansen line started construction in 1958 and opened in 1964 (19 years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It ran between Tokyo and Osaka. Nowhere near Hiroshima (280 km from Osaka) and Nagasaki (550 km from Osaka). This would be like building a rail line from Toronto to Montreal to compensate for earthquakes in London and Windsor two decades earlier. So no, they didn't build the line as part of some kind of recovery effort. Like Europe, they built it because the main lines were maxing out on capacity.

Japan also had (and still has) congested airspace and limited airport capacity. They used 747s (and 777s today) for domestic short-haul flights. Imagine taking a 777 from Toronto to Montreal or Winnipeg as the norm. The only real way to add substantial intercity travel capacity was high speed rail.

Should be mentioned too that the construction of Japan's HSR network basically bankrupted the national rail operator resulting in a massive government bailout and privatization. They still have over ¥20 trillion to pay off. That's about CA$240B. If we had even 1% of that kind of financial mess here, the government would simply shut VIA down.

My mistake. I thought it was part of their rebuilding efforts.

Interesting you say about capacity. Our existing lines between Toronto-Montreal are maxing out on capacity due to freight. Which is where the Havlock Sub comes in.

I suppose venting could be a way to release your frustrations, but a better way would be to research the thing you're frustrated about and identify ways you can contribute to the outcome you envision.

Passenger Rail service is not uniformly dying in Canada. Yes, long-distance VIA services have been on life-support since the late 70's, and many intercity routes are tenuous due to the awkward financial/commercial relationship between CN and VIA, but passenger rail has been experiencing incredible growth in Southern Ontario, primarily in the form of commuter rail, but also to a lesser extent in the Toronto-Ottawa VIA service.

The GO Expansion program is an absolutely enormous project that will bring frequent electrified service to the central portions of the GO network, and all-day express service to more distant destinations such as Kitchener, Niagara Falls and Barrie. This is not just talk, this has already been underway for a decade and the results are starting to show. I have been summarizing commuter rail schedules for the past 5 years, and between January 2015 and January 2020 the number of weekly GO train trips more than doubled from 1486 to 3472. In January 2015, only the Lakeshore lines had all-day service, with service every 30 minutes. By January 2020 there was all-day service on the Lakeshore Lines (every 15 minutes midday and every 30 minutes other times), UP Express (every 15 minutes), Kitchener line (every 60 minutes), Barrie Line (every 60 minutes) and Stouffville line (every 60 minutes). Every one of these service expansions was made possible thanks to railway expansions. Some have been huge projects, such as the Georgetown South project which completely grade-separated the Kitchener corridor east of Pearson airport and doubled the width of the infrastructure to support 4 tracks (widening to 8 tracks as the Milton and Barrie lines join in). While others have been comparatively modest, such as the projects to add double-track segments on the Barrie and Stouffville lines.

At the moment, the focus has been on introducing a base layer of local train service, so off-peak travel times have not really improved. But the next step will be to introduce some all-day regional train services, which will stop at fewer stations and achieve much higher average speeds than their corresponding local services. These services can cruise at 150 km/h, which is easily fast enough to provide very competitive travel times to destinations such as Niagara Falls and Kitchener. The only regional service which currently exists is the weekend Niagara train, though it only has 4 round trips per day and its travel times are severely limited by the 50 km/h speed limit through Hamilton and 105 km/h speed limit between Hamilton and Niagara. The next service to be introduced will be an all-day service to Hamilton (probably West Harbour), thanks to a track expansion project that Metrolinx and CN are undertaking in Hamilton. Next will be all-day hourly service to Kitchener, thanks to a Metrolinx track expansion project underway between Kitchener and Georgetown which will finally introduce passing sidings to allow bidirectional service.

As mentioned by others, VIA is hoping to revolutionize its business process through the HFR project, which would give them much more control over their own operations, and thereby vastly improve service frequency and reliability.

Of course the coronavirus pandemic has been a major setback to rail travel, and some of the changes are likely here to stay, such as the increase in telecommuting and associated reduction in peak-period commuter demand to and from office centres. The good news though is that GO's expansion program happens to already match up with the market segments which are comparatively unaffected, namely off-peak travel and longer-distance commuting.

The bottom line is that if you as a citizen want to maximize your impact on improving passenger rail in Canada, your best bet is to actively support railway improvement projects such as VIA's HFR, and Metrolinx's GO Expansion. These projects commonly face political opposition from residents near the railways, so it is important to also have political support from rail travellers and potential travellers to balance this out and reduce the chance of those projects being cancelled or watered down.

I feel the cuts in the late 80s, early 90s has done more than us citizens not riding it could have done. If the government were serious about not killing off Via, they should actively have a mandate for Via to connect all of Canada's major cities with reliable intercity rail. Take the money that they would be investing in saving the airlines from themselves, and put it to a public corporation, like Via. Alas, we all know that won't happen.

 

[crs1026]

^While looking up stuff on an earlier topic, I was struck by the volume of abandonment applications that were filed in the 1968-71 timeframe, which was the result of the changed legal framework enabling railways to apply to abandon passenger services, with the government then deciding whether to continue the service (with subsidy) or allow it to cease operation. That period clearly represented a culling of the network. Explicit culls happened again in 1981, and 1990. However, since then the network has been stable and in fact there has been growth in train service and ridership. And considerable investment (Brockville-Ottawa-Coteau upgrades, Kitchener CTC, HEP I and II rebuilds, Rennaisance fleet acquisition), albeit in fits and starts and not as a sustainable business strategy. It's not valid to say that a network that is fundamentally the same as it was 30 years ago (and in many cases better) is "dying".

I do see evidence of "Abandonment by Neglect"....such as the decline in speed and passing capability on the Kitchener-London line. There are other places where the supposedly mandated service has one foot nailed to the floor .... eg unreasonably slow speed in suburban west Ottawa, and Ste Foy to Gare Palais. Niagara and Sarnia service was allowed to atrophy. The approach of "use what the railways have available, but if they don't preserve the capacity, suck it up" is hardly showing commitment to a sustainable network.

However, where the freight infrastructure on which VIA's service depends is in decline (the Northlander being a good example, Maritime service being another), the investment just to preserve what exists may not be prudent.

So while I'm not always delighted with VIA, I would not say it has died....the challenge is how to best propel it forward, and how to enforce sustained nurturing of the network.

I will repeat my earlier comment that we may have missed the memo when VIA bobbled the triple tracking on the Kingston line. We fans of passenger only saw the good news.... some triple track was built, and VIA did add more trains as a result. What we may have discounted is how much reputational damage was done when VIA got approval to build a lot of triple track, but only achieved much less. Not all of that was VIA's fault....but in government and business circles that kind of coming back with bad news is lethal. The rescoping of that envelope towards a smaller end product must have had political and bureaucratic recriminations. And, not having the missing track that could have been built has put a damper on performance. In the end, there wasn't much for politicians to point to from that $400M investment, and little incentive to allow VIA to return to the well for more. VIA has done well just putting that caper out of memory.

- Paul