VIA Rail

[Urban Sky]

Since some of us recall the Christmas 2022 meltdown on the Lakeshore, I don’t think we can avoid the question of how much emergency resilience resources a single railroad (especially as one as tiny as VIA with such a vast geographically dispersed network) can comit to less than-annual events and whether it wouldn’t be better to bundle such extraordinary incidents nationwide across multiple industries:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1607611566609911810

Needless to say, such a federal agency could be financed through levies and charges by the very industries which would benefit from it or even use it…

 

[micheal_can]

Since you were mentioning the Christmas 2022 meltdown on the Lakeshore, I don’t think we can avoid the question of how much emergency resilience resources a single railroad (especially as one as tiny as VIA with such a vast geographically dispersed network) can comit to less than-annual events and whether it wouldn’t be better to bundel such incidents nationwide across industries:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1607611566609911810

I think we can forgive a winter time delay over a summer delay.Instead of giving all sorts of excuses, why not see that this was not handled properly.It's not like this was one of the LDR when they are in the middle of literally nowhere without even a gravel bush road near by. Via needs to show that they take these things seriously if they expect the voters to allow whomever will sign the contract for the HxR .

 

[reaperexpress]

I’m not going to deny that the way in which VIA’s Operations Control Centre has responded to this incident appears to have been once again woefully inadequate, but VIA will always be at a structural disadvantage due to the fact that they never operate more than maybe 20 trains over a network which spreads six thousand kilometers from Halifax to Vancouver and Prince Rupert. That’s about the same number of moving trains as OC Transpo has to deal with on the Confederation Line, but spread over a surface area two orders of magnitude larger than the Netherlands.

We are not talking about setting up response teams from Halifax to Vancuover and Prince Rupert, we are talking about the densely-populated Quebec-Windsor Corridor where the vast majority of Via's trains operate.

Even worse, unlike transit operators like the TTC or Metrolinx, which operate sizeable bus networks on top of its rail networks, VIA only operates these trains and therefore can’t just redeploy bus dispatching staff to help out with its rail dispatching.

As for your example with the Netherlands, densely populated European countries can afford to space out Emergency Managers 100 km or less from each other, but if you did the same with VIA, they would end up being a signficant percentage of VIA’s workforce with less than one emergency to respond to per employee and year. It should also be noted that these “Emergency Managers” are usually deployed by the infrastructure manager (ProRail in the UK, DB InfraGo in Germany) and that absolutely makes sense, because even in Europe they couldn’t afford to duplicate such an expensive and lowly-utilized resource across multiple operators. However, even for CN and CP it might not make much economic sense to duplicate such emergency response (since their non-human cargo doesn’t usually need to be physically reached within only a few hours to avoid human harm) and with remote roadways facing similar issues, I would propose to create such capabilities at the federal level directly with emergency supplies and even helicopters placed at strategic locations.

There is no need for emergency managers every 100 km in Canada. In the Netherlands they need to be able to respond everywhere quickly because the trains do not carry any food or water. As we've seen in the past few mega-delays in the Corridor, the Via trains do have sufficient food, water and toilet capacity to tide over about 4 hours of delay, the issue is with delays that have the potential to be longer than that. So instead of aiming to respond to the site of a stranded train within 1 hour, we only need to respond within 4 hours. Which you can accomplish with just two response centres: Toronto and Montreal, both of which already have numerous Via Rail employees at stations, offices and yards who could potentially be called upon in the extremely rare event of such a long delay.

Like you mentioned, it would be beneficial for the emergency managers to have a broader scope for economies of scale. CN and CPKC have their own police departments, so even in the absence of human cargo there is clearly a demand for incident response. Perhaps there's a case for a federally-operated railway police covering the QC-W corridor incorporating some of the current functions of CN and CPKC police if those companies are willing to pay some of the operating costs. Or even just improving agreements with CN such that their existing railway police have more ability to help out in cases like this. According to the City article it was local firefighters who eventually evacuated the train, but local firefighters are not necessarily fully trained in railway occupancy rules, nor practiced in communication with rail dispatch. Railway police are.

I’m pretty sure I already said something very similar after a Christmas storm brought VIA’s Lakeshore services to a meltdown 2 or 3 years ago, but nobody can respond effectively and efficiently to such emergencies unless you bundle the transportation networks and areas to be overseen, as you need to justify having multiple employees available immediately and more on very short notice…

Yes, you clearly would need to bundle emergency response positions with other less time-sensitive work. Which is why the post you're quoting describes the additional capacity as being provided by people who already have a different function.

As a general rule of thumb: if some dude on an internet forum can come up with a plausible and failry obvious idea, you can kind of assume that those professionals which are actually paid to make contingency plans have already come up with your idea and exhaustively investigated how practical it is…

Having been one of said professionals (not for Via rail, but also for a publicly-owned transport operator), I attest that just because a professional has investigated something and decided not to proceed, it doesn't mean that the concept is a bad idea. Via's professionals are largely constrained to what Via can accomplish within its own powers, which are pretty limited. For many potential improvents such as the one we're discussing new organizational structures outside of Via's powers would need to be created, which would need to be led at a Ministerial level. And unfortunately politicians often listen more to their constituents than to the professionals who actually have far more expertise on a given matter. So some ideas that would be impcatical from the perspective of a Via Rail civil servant could be practical from the persepctive of an outside observer if combined with sufficient public outcry.

 

[Northern Light]

Sorry, @Urban Sky but I'm all-in with @lenaitch here.

Outcomes are everything.

I'm not interested in excuses.

Real people, children, the elderly, the disabled and just plain paying customers have a terrible experience that will live on in the their family lore for a generation. Its 10M in bad publicity, at the very least.

There is no need to spend anywhere near 10M to avoid such a terrible outcome.

Ita a failure, both in logistical set up and but also in training of personnel and lack of freedom to act or obligation to act.

Not ok, at all. One which I sincerely believe should result in disciplinarian action, beginning at the senior executive level.

 

[Urban Sky]

Sorry, @Urban Sky but I'm all-in with @lenaitch here.

Outcomes are everything.

I'm not interested in excuses.

Real people, children, the elderly, the disabled and just plain paying customers have a terrible experience that will live on in the their family lore for a generation. Its 10M in bad publicity, at the very least.

There is no need to spend anywhere near 10M to avoid such a terrible outcome.

Ita laziness, both in logistical set up and but also in training of personnel and lack of freedom to act or obligation to act. Its a clear sense of 'We will fix this when its convenient to us, @#$@ you"

Not ok, at all. A firing offense for every manager and supervisor on duty and an unpaid suspension for front-line crew for 2 months on top.

No one gets to deliver so poorly on their job.

As @reaperexpress has explained directly above before your own post, many of these issues can only be addressed by VIA’s masters directly. You may chose a less aggressive language if you want me to bother writing a more elaborate answer. Have a good night!

 

[reaperexpress]

Sorry, @Urban Sky but I'm all-in with @lenaitch here.

Outcomes are everything.

I'm not interested in excuses.

Real people, children, the elderly, the disabled and just plain paying customers have a terrible experience that will live on in the their family lore for a generation. Its 10M in bad publicity, at the very least.

There is no need to spend anywhere near 10M to avoid such a terrible outcome.

Ita laziness, both in logistical set up and but also in training of personnel and lack of freedom to act or obligation to act. Its a clear sense of 'We will fix this when its convenient to us, @#$@ you"

Not ok, at all. A firing offense for every manager and supervisor on duty and an unpaid suspension for front-line crew for 2 months on top.

No one gets to deliver so poorly on their job.

I fully agree that we cannot simply pass off this type of recurring situation by making excuses like pointing to population density, management structures etc. Those are factors contributing to the situations, but they do not justify the situations. These situations are not acceptable and we need to seriously evaluate all of the options to prevent them and not limit ourselves to the tools available to Via Rail itself.

However, I agree with @Urban Sky that your last three lines here are uncalled for. There is a good chance that this unacceptable outcome was not caused by any particular people not doing their jobs well or correctly, but rather by systemic issues with the procedures included in their positions, management structures and organizational structures. Sure, maybe the situation could have been partially mitigated if someone had gone above and beyond, but we cannot be dependent on people violating their company policies or procedures during high-pressure incidents.

 

[Urban Sky]

We are not talking about setting up response teams from Halifax to Vancuover and Prince Rupert, we are talking about the densely-populated Quebec-Windsor Corridor where the vast majority of Via's trains operate.

Unlike other parts of VIA’s Corridor network (think: LNDN-BRTF-GTHA-CBRG-BLVL-KGON-BRKV-CWLL-MTRL), this particular stretch of line is rather sparsely populated, even for European standards: recall that it is about 150 km from Drummondville to Quebec with only one larger population center (Victoriaville with 45k people) inbetween.

There is no need for emergency managers every 100 km in Canada. In the Netherlands they need to be able to respond everywhere quickly because the trains do not carry any food or water. As we've seen in the past few mega-delays in the Corridor, the Via trains do have sufficient food, water and toilet capacity to tide over about 4 hours of delay, the issue is with delays that have the potential to be longer than that. So instead of aiming to respond to the site of a stranded train within 1 hour, we only need to respond within 4 hours. Which you can accomplish with just two response centres: Toronto and Montreal, both of which already have numerous Via Rail employees at stations, offices and yards who could potentially be called upon in the extremely rare event of such a long delay.

I’m assuming that even under the best circumstances, there would be a lead time of one hour to dispatch a response team and that it would take approximately another two hours to get to an incident site similar to the one yesterday. This means that in order to respect the four-window, you would have to make the dispatch decision already one hour after a train got stranded.

If you look at your timeline of events, I believe it is extremely unlikely that it was foreseeable at such an early stage as one hour after the initial equipment failure that passengers would still be stranded on the train 3 (let alone: 11) hours later. And as a regular and interested reader of VIA’s “Morning reports” while I was working for VIA, it seems to be extremely rare that you can foresee excessive delays at such an early stage. Because seemingly simple issues often only reveal themselves as complex issues once attempt after attempt of fixing it fail and “bigger guns” nead to be subsequently deployed (with large lead times each).

Which turns any dispatching decisions for said emergency response team into a classic statistical problem with “false positives” and “false negatives”, where “false positives” are decisions where emergency response teams are dispatched in vain (as the issue can subsequently be resolved before the emergency response team arrives at the incident site), whereas “false negatives” are incidents which last longer than the four-hour window but to which no emergency response team is dispatched in time to reach the incident site within the four-hour window. I have a hard time imagining that anyone could design a set of business rules about when and when not to dispatch the emergency response team without excessive rates of either “false positives” or “false negatives” (or even both).

Like you mentioned, it would be beneficial for the emergency managers to have a broader scope for economies of scale. CN and CPKC have their own police departments, so even in the absence of human cargo there is clearly a demand for incident response. Perhaps there's a case for a federally-operated railway police covering the QC-W corridor incorporating some of the current functions of CN and CPKC police if those companies are willing to pay some of the operating costs. Or even just improving agreements with CN such that their existing railway police have more ability to help out in cases like this. According to the City article it was local firefighters who eventually evacuated the train, but local firefighters are not necessarily fully trained in railway occupancy rules, nor practiced in communication with rail dispatch. Railway police are.

Yes, you clearly would need to bundle emergency response positions with other less time-sensitive work. Which is why the post you're quoting describes the additional capacity as being provided by people who already have a different function.

Having been one of said professionals (not for Via rail, but also for a publicly-owned transport operator), I attest that just because a professional has investigated something and decided not to proceed, it doesn't mean that the concept is a bad idea. Via's professionals are largely constrained to what Via can accomplish within its own powers, which are pretty limited. For many potential improvents such as the one we're discussing new organizational structures outside of Via's powers would need to be created, which would need to be led at a Ministerial level. And unfortunately politicians often listen more to their constituents than to the professionals who actually have far more expertise on a given matter. So some ideas that would be impcatical from the perspective of a Via Rail civil servant could be practical from the persepctive of an outside observer if combined with sufficient public outcry.

Fully agreed: Trained staff needs to be at the site within a reasonable timeframe and it is doubtful whether VIA has currently the necessary resources and mandate at its disposal to make this happen. Firefighters are certainly often the quickest emergency response personal to arrive at an incident site, but as the Lac Megantic disaster has exposed so horribly, they are no replacement for trained staff, as their (entirely understandable) decision to switch of the burning locomotive (which slowly depressurized the air breaks of the train until it depended solely at the hand brakes, which were insufficiently applied) was an important step in the event chain which led to the disaster…

Anyways, I really need to go to bed, but I deeply appreciate how you challenge us with European experiences - just like I often (try to) do the same…

 

[Urban Sky]

I fully agree that we cannot simply pass off this type of recurring situation by making excuses like pointing to population density, management structures etc. Those are factors contributing to the situations, but they do not justify the situations. These situations are not acceptable and we need to seriously evaluate all of the options to prevent them and not limit ourselves to the tools available to Via Rail itself.

However, I agree with @Urban Sky that your last three lines here are uncalled for. There is a good chance that this unacceptable outcome was not caused by any particular people not doing their jobs well or correctly, but rather by systemic issues with the procedures included in their positions, management structures and organizational structures. Sure, maybe the situation could have been partially mitigated if someone had gone above and beyond, but we cannot be dependent on people violating their company policies or procedures during high-pressure incidents.

Thank you, and just one final comment for today: there is a good reason why Accident Report focus on factual events and contributing factors which led to the investigated incident (including the emergency response) rather than trying to attribute blame, because their purpose is to try to prevent an incident from reoccuring and that can only be achieved through the cooperation of everyone who was involved in events that led to that incident or dealt with its aftermath. Assigning blame is the job of Prosecutors and Judges, but they can only really get busy after the facts have been established…

 

[dowlingm]

There is a point there about comparing dissimilar geographies. Quebec City to Montreal is 254km, and that is just one segment of the corridor, if we restrict expectations just to there. From top to bottom of the entire country of the Netherlands (say Eemshaven to Maastricht) is 370km.

 

[Northern Light]

As @reaperexpress has explained directly above before your own post, many of these issues can only be addressed by VIA’s masters directly. You may chose a less aggressive language if you want me to bother writing a more elaborate answer. Have a good night!

The language I chose wasn't aimed as you, as you aren't employed with the organization in question currently or particularly recently, I don't really think it was unfair, however, as I had no desire to offend, I have edited that post to take it back a notch.

****

The above said and done........ this isn't the first, serious, incident of its type, in relatively recent times. (A significant, multi-hour delay to passengers, one which left passengers w/o reasonable comforts and/or necessities for an extended period of time, in 'The Corridor', and relatively close to a population centre and third-party emergency support services, which were not employed).

While it is ultimately on Cabinet/the Minister to provide proper resources and direction to VIA's Board, the responsibility to have proper policy in place, proper resources for and training of staff, in management, in dispatch and at the train crew level is the direct line responsibility of VIA management, and their Board.

Given the previous, high profile incident, there is no reasonable way to claim that it could not have been foreseen, and sufficient time has elapsed since that last incident to have put in place changes to achieve a better outcome.

****

It is not on front-line crew, if the equipment breaks down, nor is it on them to address policies around refunds, and I don't expect the engineer to personally try to wrangle a fleet of taxis...........

But I do expect staff to treat a lack of food, water and on-board power, for more than several hours, as what it is, an 'emergency'; and if the highest ranking person on duty is not taking satisfactory action to both escalate and mitigate.

 

[nfitz]

I suggest you might want to actually work in a customer-facing job where you might find yourself locked with hundreds of increasingly anxious and exasperated passengers into a confined space while their 3-hour trip and your 4-hour shift unexpectedly triples in length before you start volunteering your opinions about what kind of behaviors might be excusable given the circumstances and which ones aren’t…

I can't imagine any scenario where physical assault is excusable - especially when all the person who was assaulted did nothing.

 

[Urban Sky]

I can't imagine any scenario where physical assault is excusable - especially when all the person who was assaulted did nothing.

As I wrote in the disclaimer you somehow forgot to include in your quote, I refrained myself from watching the video footage, as I believe watching staff members and passengers interacting in such a state of anxiety and exasperation borders on voyeurism and wouldn’t provide sufficient context. I just don’t think that “heads should roll” is an appropriate way to judge the behavior of people making split-second decisions in highly extraordinary situations of extreme stress. Watch some team sports to recall how inappropriately even infinitely better paid and trained individuals allow themselves to react in much less extreme situations without having to defend themselves afterwards against calls that they should loose their job.

I personally make more than twice what a Service Attendant at VIA makes and still slightly more than what a Locomotive Engineer does and it’s ridiculous that it’s me who has the flexibile hours (allowing me to spontaneously take time off whenever one of my kids can’t go to daycare for whatever reason) and that I don’t have to worry about making any errors (even really bad ones) at work, because there is always a colleague and eventually an actual engineer who checks my work (and certifies it with his seal) before anything I worked on might get implemented.

That’s why I won’t apologize for criticizing people who feel the entitlement to pass judgement about people who might have made wrong decisions in extreme circumstances. I believe @reaperexpress summed up the incident quite well past night:

Sure, maybe the situation could have been partially mitigated if someone had gone above and beyond, but we cannot be dependent on people violating their company policies or procedures during high-pressure incidents.

For everything else, there will be internal and external investigations which will establish the appropriate actions to address the factors and behaviors which led to any of the incidents which inconvenienced any passengers or employees. This may of course ultimately include disciplinary action against individual employees, but demanding at this point with the insufficient information everyone here has that “heads should roll” turns an investigation into a witch hunt and I believe I have every right to call out people who attempt to publicly discredit people for making unfortunate decisions in extreme situations, while rather cowardly shielding their own privacy behind a pseudonym in an internet forum…

 

[reaperexpress]

I can't imagine any scenario where physical assault is excusable - especially when all the person who was assaulted did nothing.

I'm not talking about that. Obviously that employee acted inappropriately and should be disciplined accordingly. I'm talking about the lack of organization and communication that led to people being stranded for 10h in a populated area without sufficient food, water or sanitation just because of mechanical issues.

There is a point there about comparing dissimilar geographies. Quebec City to Montreal is 254km, and that is just one segment of the corridor, if we restrict expectations just to there. From top to bottom of the entire country of the Netherlands (say Eemshaven to Maastricht) is 370km.

Well yeah obviously. But I'm not suggesting that we blindly copy/paste the entirety of Dutch railway management, I'm talking about taking lessons from jurisdictions that have demonstrated competent incident response. Like I said in my previous post, our corridor is longer but we also have about 4x more time available before we need help to arrive on scene.

It is tiresome how Canadians often refuse to even consider learning from other jurisdictions on the basis that Canada cold, or spread out or whatever. But those factors don't immediately invalidate every practice. For example being larger does not make it impossible or useless for the rail infrastructure manager's response team to have lights and sirens for use when warranted. In fact the longer distances make that even more beneficial here.

 

[crs1026]

I have some sympathy for the train crew (not saying they handled it well, but....) as they were probably as frustrated as anybody about having to stand still with absolutely no means to take corrective action. It's actually pretty stressful to have no answers for people when you are the ones who have to deal with them face to face, and what you are telling them isn't sufficient.

The assumption I am making (based on the number of tweets that have turned up) is that the train stopped in an area with good cellular coverage. So my question is, was there clear, accurate, continuous and effective contact between the train crew and the operations base. And did anyone at the operations base have the mandate to actually operationalise a rescue, and did they have direct contact with the crew to feed them updates. Or was the crew simply given the usual corporatespeak and told to assure passengers that everything was being looked after.

I can understand that on the cusp of a long weekend, the bus supply might be limited....but.... what VIA needs is not simply a list of coach operators, but some sort of a retainer arrangement where the operators commit to give VIA priority over, say, the local football team.

I note that VIA's reply alluded to freight interference - I wonder if this was true or just blame shifting. If true, perhaps one needs to ask why VIA had to send a rescue train from further away, when a locomotive might have been borrowable. Perhaps there needs to be a time threshold where CN is obligated to halt a freight and send the power to rescue VIA. (Freight railways do this regularly when their own trains break down).

Some of the tweets indicate that the local fire department did respond and assisted with passenger transfers when the following VIA train turned up. I wonder whether there should be a legal threshold where a trapped trainload or planeload of people automatically becomes a "rescue" situation and authority passes to the fire or police. (Having said that, most police or fire chiefs would likely deem a trainload of people sheltering in an undamaged vehicle to be in a place of safety, so wouldn't take any action, but their response assures that peoples' condition will be checked on and any medical or similar issues would receive attention).

Similarly, in this world of non-redundant head end power - I wonder whether any situation involving total shutdown of HVAC and/or toilets ought to trigger "emergency" status.

A lot of the passengers' (and crew's) stress in this kind of situation derives from the belief that nobody out there is looking after things and giving the situation priority. VIa has the obligation not just to take action, but to demonstrate to passengers that help is on the way. Sure sounds like that wasn't accomplished.

- Paul

 

[Urban Sky]

Just to share two comments from Groups.io, the first one from @TerryJohnson:

I’m sure there will be a comparison of what was promised after the December 22 fiasco and what happened here.

I’ve said this before: Stuff happens. A good crew can keep everyone mostly happy until the toilets overflow. Then all bets are off. The contingency plan must be calibrated to ensure that relief equipment arrives or passengers are detrained before that happens.

That there wasn’t a mutiny is really quite surprising. Amtrak has a load of people detrain themselves and go wandering around on live track in a similar situation on the Wolverine.

Having a contingency plan that works requires the one thing VIA hasn’t got though, which is adequate funding to do things like keep relief locomotives and crews around.

I hope there is also a deep dive on why equipment keeps leaving MMC with problems, or being held for last-minute maintenance that really should have been caught the night before.

Terry Johnson
Chatham, Ontario


The second comment:

The dead Siemens TS10, originally broke down at Fortier due to air line issues, was temporarily fixed by CN yardmaster from Joffre and released to continue with 15 mph restriction, then it broke down again at Laurier-Station, engine couldn’t be started with air line issues and blocking mainline at Laurier-Station. VIA 24 was expected to push dead 622 to Quebec City but that didn’t work out at all.

VIA sent out rescue crew on 308 at 12 am in the morning, made to Laurier-Station, coupled on to the dead set and headed west towards MMC, stranded at Saint-Eugène as CN closed tracks due to earthquake, that crew ran out of hours, another crew was called to take over and finally get back on move at 13:35.


***

I have a hard time identifying how any of these four (!) separate and subsequent issues could have been anticipated or avoided…