In Trains, Bill Stephens outlines some of the strikes against VIA Rail Canada’s hopes for a dedicated passenger-train-only route between Toronto and Quebec City:
Last month VIA’s $4 billion plan got a $71 million boost that will fund additional feasibility studies. It shouldn’t take $71 million to figure out the plan is fatally flawed. Why? Because it won’t accomplish its chief aim: Eliminating the mind-boggling delays related to sharing tracks with Canadian National freight trains.
To be successful, passenger service needs to be fast, frequent, and dependable. VIA’s current service is faster than driving between Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal. It’s fairly frequent, too, with seven weekday departures between Toronto and Montreal. But it’s not dependable. On-time performance is in the low 70% range for the entire Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City corridor. VIA blames the late trains on interference from CN freights, primarily on the double-track route linking Toronto and Montreal.
So you can understand why VIA would lobby the Canadian government for a dedicated passenger route. Last year VIA’s Eastern Corridor, the Canadian equivalent of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, carried three-quarters of VIA’s entire ridership. It stands to reason that you can fill more seats with service that’s faster, more frequent, and more reliable.
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Keeping passenger and freight trains on time takes a combination of operational discipline, the right track capacity, and a willingness to make it work. CN takes pride in its operational discipline, and executives say the Eastern portion of the railroad, between Chicago and Halifax, is underutilized. What’s missing, it seems, is a willingness to expedite VIA trains.
VIA needs a cooperative host railroad more than it needs a new route that would bypass intermediate population centers, face opposition from the not-in-my-backyard crowd, take years to build, and in the end would still have to rely on shared trackage in key areas.
Also a monumental problem without an apparent solution: Squeezing extra trains into Toronto Union Station and Central Station in Montreal on new approaches that would only complicate operations and increase conflicts with freight and commuter traffic.
