Interview with head of VIA Rail

[Gerald Henriksen]

He seems to want the private sector will build him a VIA only rail line:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/via-rail-chief-plots-a-new-path-to-prosperity/article22194338/

 

[Ian Smeeton]

Looking at the passenger numbers, I don't think that there is much of a case.

 

The busiest day sees 8,700 passengers?

 

How many are at Euston, Paddington or Waterloo at any given moment in any day?

 

A few more than their entire daily throughput I should think!

 

 

Regards

 

 

Ian

[davknigh]

Looking at the passenger numbers, I don't think that there is much of a case.

 

The busiest day sees 8,700 passengers?

 

How many are at Euston, Paddington or Waterloo at any given moment in any day?

 

A few more than their entire daily throughput I should think!

 

 

Regards

 

 

Ian

Err, no, that's Toronto only. The number goes up to 15,700 in the Quebec - Windsor corridor and that's VIA only so traffic carried by GO transit in Toronto and AMT in Montreal would bump the number of travelers considerably. Comparison with UK stations is not helpful either as the entire UK could be dropped into southern Ontario with room to spare and the UK has 64,000,000 and Canada has about 35,000,000 spread over a vast area. Add to this the fact that the current government, OK to be fair, any of the governments we've had for the past 40 odd years have been doing their best to dump rail passenger service you can understand why he's trying to get private sector funding. Will the private sector help? Not without government subsidies. Oh well....

 

Cheers,

 

David

[Peter Beckett]

As a visitor this year to Canada and having booked sleeper cabins from Edmonton to Saskatoon, then Saskatoon to Winnipeg and finally Winnipeg to Toronto, my wife and I found out how much ViaRail was/is treated like second/ third class users of the railway system. We have nothing but praise for the comfort and meals and service on the trains but getting on was a problem.

 

We arrived at 2330 hrs for the first train from Edmonton to be told there would be a delay possibly 1 hour. That did not sound too bad but before long more announcements of delays, We finally left Edmonton at 0630 in the morning. Next trip was from Saskatoon about a week later and similar events happened but only this time we were 4.5 hrs late. Thanks to the ViaRail staff we were able to get our reserved cars at Saskatoon and Winnipeg held for us. The train from Winnipeg was only held up 4 hrs at this time and arrived in Toronto 3.5 hrs late as the crew made up a bit of time. The single track with passing loops gave me many chances to take pictures of the countryside as the frequent freight trains rumbled pass.   I have a theory if the rail system was extended to St Johns, Newfoundland then the trains would be on time as they did seem to improve with distance (very much tongue in cheek)

If Canada is really interested in tourists coming to see their great country and not fly over it, then somebody needs to work out a better or improved system. I know that with the distances, etc, freight is important but tourist dollars also help.

We travelled from the Yukon to Newfoundland in just under 3 months and the actual train journeys were a relief to get away from the rubbish at airports with security checks, etc. 

 

Peter

[Dava]

I suspect the VIA rail map will get smaller before anyone invests in a new line. He refers to the Montreal- Halifax route as loss making, a hint that VIA and/or CN want out?

 

Dava

[dibber25]

All of VIA is loss-making in that the organisation requires a huge government subsidy, as do most passenger railways in the World. The freight priority thing is a noose around VIA's neck. There is nothing more frustrating to passengers than being held for an hour to wait for a freight, or to crawl across Southern Ontario for mile after mile at 25mph. Then, having spent £1,200 for the privilege of arriving after lunch instead of after breakfast (lunch was makeshift - roast beef Yorkshire pudding gravy and potato salad with mayonnaise!) you're told that the Canadian taxpayer has subsidised you by $600! Passengers do NOT enjoy being treated as less important than tin boxes, whoever's railway track they are on. The Canadian government simply needs to legislate priority for passenger trains but, it will never happen because they don't want passenger trains and they are doing everything possible to drive passengers away. I asked, recently, who paid for the additional track that's been laid on a stretch of the 'corridor'. Apparently the government paid for it but that still doesn't mean VIA Rail has priority over it, it just means there's more capacity and the number of freight/passenger conflicts are reduced. There are no penalties for VIA trains delayed by freight derailments or other problems created by the infrastructure owner. If you think the privatised British system is lousy and unfair, it pales into insignificance alongside VIA Rail. And don't get me started on the terrifying practice of not having multiple track main lines segregated by direction - it restricts - or should restrict - high speed running, and sooner or later there will be a major catastrophe. It might be unavoidable on single lines and it might be OK at 30 or 40mph but modern passenger railways need to be carrying passengers at much greater speed and switching back and forth as they do on the corridor with 100mph trains is absurd. One of the reasons I was given was that 'stations aren't always on the right side of the line for the direction of travel'. So build a second platform - this is the 21st century.

[dave1905]

Its not so much the freight railroads giving preference as it is the number of freight trains and the footprint of the passenger train.  I have managed territories with passenger trains on them.  The dispatchers would have to start holding freight trains literally over 100 miles ahead of the passenger train in order to have spots to get the passenger train around the freight trains and there were still frequent 2 on 1 meets or sawbys.  The speed of the passenger train makes it a large interruption in the flow.  If the freights are moving at 30-50 mph and the passenger trains are moving at 70-79 mph, even double track won't help the situation because the passenger train will overtake the freights.  Not saying that freight railroads can't do a better job, but its a lot more complicated than it seems.

[WessexEclectic]

Via Rail - a Canadian Railway Tragedy.

 

The political will is simply not there. Just look at Ontario Northland.

[dibber25]

Via Rail - a Canadian Railway Tragedy.

 

The political will is simply not there. Just look at Ontario Northland.

I had half-expected the the present right-wing government to do a UK-style privatisation exercise and franchise VIA Rail out to the likes of First Group. However, I guess the major hurdle would be creating a workable franchise, when the government doesn't own the tracks and presumably can't legislate authority for a third party to run over the second party's rails. It is difficult to see a long term future or even medium term, for VIA Rail. It has reduced in size so much in the past 20 years, shedding routes completely and reducing the number of trains on other routes. How it manages to operate the existing services with such a limited amount of equipment, is a minor miracle. But for a dose of reality, check out the CP-24 Toronto news broadcast about yesterday being VIA's busiest day of the year. It was filmed in Union station with half a dozen people waiting to board The Maple Leaf to New York and the station is otherwise deserted! It looks like VIA's busiest day has produced 10 passengers instead of two and makes the 'busy railway' story look like a piece of nonsense.

More importantly, despite the aspirations of its CEO, VIA has no long term plan itself - or even a long term proposal, and no plans to replace locomotives and rolling stock which are mostly mid-life or old, and which are suffering attrition through accident loss etc. I know the 6400s have been rebuilt but that would give them only 10-15 years and some of them are well into that now. LRC cars must be 20 years old at least and the stainless steel stock is over 50 years old. The Ren stock is past its best after a comparatively short time because it wasn't built for the job its doing (it does, however, ride better than some of the older stock). I know stainless steel cars last forever but they weigh heavy, making them uneconomic by modern standards and pushing up operating costs. VIA Rail and its standing with the government and the railways on which it operates, needs a complete overhaul of every aspect but it will only get one if it first finds strong management and a favourable relationship with at least some politicians. I don't see it getting either and in 40 years time I see Canada looking back and regretting the loss of an amazing transport asset, squandered away in the first two decades of the 21st century.

CHRIS LEIGH

[davknigh]

On the plus side VIA has been hard to kill (so far). When created in 1977 all the odds were stacked in favour of the freight lines. VIA leased track from CN & CP and paid through the nose to say nothing of getting all the well worn equipment from CN & CP. Repeated Ministers of Transport have said "use it or lose it" and people continue to use it. Some of the cuts have been due to GO expanding service thus rendering trains redundant for at least part of their route. That said, I have to agree with Chris, barring a massive sea change in attitude from Ottawa and management that is not terrified of speaking out passenger rail will be gone as a  cross country experience and I'm so glad I've been able to use it.

 

Cheers,

 

David

 

PS Merry Christmas.

[steve1]

Having travelled from Ottawa to Victoria BC by rail and then back to Calgary, I cannot conceive of a better way to see such an amazing country as by train.

 

If the passenger service is lost then that will be a real crime.

 

steve

 

Edit - grammar

[dibber25]

Having travelled from Ottawa to Victoria BC by rail and then back to Calgary, I cannot conceive of a better way to see such an amazing country as by train.

 

If the passenger service is lost then that will be a real crime.

 

steve

 

Edit - grammar

Halifax is teetering on the brink of losing its service to Montreal and that would bring to an end cost-to-coast service. 'The Canadian' (Toronto-Vancouver) is the flagship service that brings in the tourist dollars but it's not well used in the winter, often delayed, and very expensive to operate due to the number of trains required to maintain 5 departures a week in summer and the high staffing levels on a 20+ cars train with 10 or 12 sleeping cars. It must now be a target for some form of economies but it is so wrapped up in the national folk-lore that it would be a brave government that killed it off. Privatising it out to something like the Rocky Mountaineer (Heaven forbid) would be more likely but that would entail the end of sleeping car service and overnight stops in hotels spinning the journey out to unrealistic lengths. That's a major part of the problem that VIA faces - just how do you keep that trans-continental service affordable, even with subsidies. Rail should be able to offer advantages that get Canadians out of their cars, by being faster and more relaxing than driving or flying but with the current operating practices which date from 100 years ago, it simply cannot compete.

[Gerald Henriksen]

It might be unavoidable on single lines and it might be OK at 30 or 40mph but modern passenger railways need to be carrying passengers at much greater speed and switching back and forth as they do on the corridor with 100mph trains is absurd. One of the reasons I was given was that 'stations aren't always on the right side of the line for the direction of travel'. So build a second platform - this is the 21st century.

 

Of course part of the problem is that it is the 21st century - not only do you need to build the second platform but also need a tunnel or bridge to get to it, and these days that means at least 2 elevators which dramatically increases the costs.

 

So this now substantial cost must compete with other projects for a limited capital budget.

[Peter Beckett]

Gerald Henriksen, on 25 Dec 2014 - 15:46, said:

Of course part of the problem is that it is the 21st century - not only do you need to build the second platform but also need a tunnel or bridge to get to it, and these days that means at least 2 elevators which dramatically increases the costs.

 

So this now substantial cost must compete with other projects for a limited capital budget.

From my observations, the stations at Saskatoon and Winnipeg, where the train had actually to reverse across freight lines to reach the station, were obviously not the original stations but merely an extension of a freight yard. In both stations we had to get a taxi/cab to get back into the respective cities as we were well out in the sticks.

The other extreme frustration was none of the ViaRail people had any idea when the train would arrive or depart so our (what we thought) well planned connections to our hire cars, etc quickly evaporated. As one who has travelled all over the UK, Russia by the Siberian Rail and Amtrak in eastern USA and many parts of Australia this was incredible to us.

 

Peter

[Grovenor]

Privatising it out to something like the Rocky Mountaineer (Heaven forbid) would be more likely but that would entail the end of sleeping car service and overnight stops in hotels spinning the journey out to unrealistic lengths.

Australia has managed to franchise out the equivalent trains, including sleeping cars!

Keith

[Edwin_m]

Its not so much the freight railroads giving preference as it is the number of freight trains and the footprint of the passenger train.  I have managed territories with passenger trains on them.  The dispatchers would have to start holding freight trains literally over 100 miles ahead of the passenger train in order to have spots to get the passenger train around the freight trains and there were still frequent 2 on 1 meets or sawbys.  The speed of the passenger train makes it a large interruption in the flow.  If the freights are moving at 30-50 mph and the passenger trains are moving at 70-79 mph, even double track won't help the situation because the passenger train will overtake the freights.  Not saying that freight railroads can't do a better job, but its a lot more complicated than it seems.

Don't the most important intermodals run at similar speeds to Amtrak/VIA? I seem to remember calculating a 50mph average for a couple of Amtrak's western routes, which would be running at mostly 79mph interrupted by longish stops.  This would be fairly compatible with a freight which runs at a lower speed but keeps going except for crew changes. 

[dave1905]

Intermodal trains normally operate at 60-70 mph.  The freights have an upper speed of typically 50-60 mph.  This is max.  You have to add in crew changes, meets and passes (to let opposing trains around and faster, higher priority trains get ahead), work events (trains may still make pick ups and set outs along the way), plus track work (you have to inspect the track a minimum of once a week, daily in the summer, then there are tie gangs, rail gangs, curve gangs, surfacing gangs, bridge gangs, etc).  Over the course of an entire trains route, its lucky if it averages 20 mph.  Just like Amtrak averages about 30 mph slower than its max the freights do about the same.

[dibber25]

Intermodal trains normally operate at 60-70 mph.  The freights have an upper speed of typically 50-60 mph.  This is max.  You have to add in crew changes, meets and passes (to let opposing trains around and faster, higher priority trains get ahead), work events (trains may still make pick ups and set outs along the way), plus track work (you have to inspect the track a minimum of once a week, daily in the summer, then there are tie gangs, rail gangs, curve gangs, surfacing gangs, bridge gangs, etc).  Over the course of an entire trains route, its lucky if it averages 20 mph.  Just like Amtrak averages about 30 mph slower than its max the freights do about the same.

Both Amtrak and VIA seem very insular. I wonder if they ever look at what passenger rail is doing in the rest of the World. I just get the impression that they struggle along and don't really feel that they can have any sort of future. They seem prepossessed about coping with all these 'problems' without looking seriously at how they might be overcome. Sad. The UK system is now carrying annually more passengers than it carried when the system was at its maximum size (in track miles).

[jjb1970]

In fairness the UK is a small very densely populated country, with a population spread which favours rail. In the US and Canada there is clearly potential for urban transit railways but much less so for the sort of high intensity inter-urban operations of countries in Europe or Japan. Nowadays a high speed rail link would be competitive with air over much longer distances than traditional rail but such lines are expensive to build and need a pretty big customer base to be viable. I think American and European railways are almost like polar opposites. One is superb at moving huge amounts of freight very efficiently and maintaining rail freights share, the other carries frieght efficiently tends to be much more pessenger focused with a lower market share for freight. Interestingly the same geographic/demographic factors which are difficult for NA passenger operations assist freight transport by rail I think.

[pH]

Thank you, jjb1970. That saves me writing what I was going to write, and it's done much better than I would have managed!

[Edwin_m]

Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (Washington-Boston) and the Montreal-Toronto route in Canada are the only sections of the North American rail network that are comparable to Europe.  I know little of the current state of play in Canada but that part of Amtrak has had a lot of investment and journey times and rail modal shares are about the same as between European cities of similar size and separation.  The Obama administration has been trying to encourage high speed rail between other suitably-space city pairs, without much success as yet, but I don't think any other places in Canada are close enough together for rail to be competitive on journey time and have big enough populations to fill the trains. 

[davknigh]

Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (Washington-Boston) and the Montreal-Toronto route in Canada are the only sections of the North American rail network that are comparable to Europe.  I know little of the current state of play in Canada but that part of Amtrak has had a lot of investment and journey times and rail modal shares are about the same as between European cities of similar size and separation.  The Obama administration has been trying to encourage high speed rail between other suitably-space city pairs, without much success as yet, but I don't think any other places in Canada are close enough together for rail to be competitive on journey time and have big enough populations to fill the trains. 

The Quebec City, Windsor corridor qualifies for density and has been talked about for years, and years, and years. The problems are; grade crossings of which there are multitudes, freight traffic which gets in the way and land costs which escalate on a daily basis. The matter has been studied to death but the only thing government wants to talk about is lower taxes and private enterprise wants subsidies. So we do nothing.

 

Cheers,

 

David

[dave1905]

All the truly high speed lines are passenger only (150 mph +).  Most of the passenger lines in other countries don't have anywhere near the freight density that US roads do.  Amtrak can barely get enough funding to keep the equipment running let alone the billions or trillions to actually create real high speed rail.

[Adrian Wintle]

The Quebec City, Windsor corridor qualifies for density and has been talked about for years, and years, and years. The problems are; grade crossings of which there are multitudes, freight traffic which gets in the way and land costs which escalate on a daily basis. The matter has been studied to death but the only thing government wants to talk about is lower taxes and private enterprise wants subsidies. So we do nothing.

 

Cheers,

 

David

 

While they talk of the Quebec-Windsor Corridor, there is really little traffic outside of the Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa region, and not a lot in that (in the grand scheme of things). VIA also does itself no favours in its scheduling.

 

 

Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (Washington-Boston) and the Montreal-Toronto route in Canada are the only sections of the North American rail network that are comparable to Europe.  I know little of the current state of play in Canada but that part of Amtrak has had a lot of investment and journey times and rail modal shares are about the same as between European cities of similar size and separation.   

 

Suggesting that the Montreal-Toronto corridor is like Europe is really stretching it. You basically have two large cities 500km apart. There are only a couple of intermediate stops of any size (and they are all less than 200,000 people). Add the fact that the non-business passengers on this corridor are likely not going city centre to city centre and the journey time increases significantly. I live about 40km north of Toronto Union Station, and often visit my parents in Kingston. It is a 2³/₄ hour drive, or it is a 5-10 minute drive (or half hour walk) to Newmarket station, an hour ride on the GO train, a two hour ride on VIA, and a 10-15 minute drive to their house (walking is out of the question). Public transit is only of marginal use on either end and would increase the trip time (it would take longer for me to get from home to Newmarket station on York Region Transit than it would take me to walk). Add waiting time and you are approaching an hour longer for the trip, at a one-way cost that would cover the round-trip gas (petrol) of the drive with plenty left over. The only time I've used the train for this trip is when I was meeting up with someone who would be driving back.

 

To give an idea of VIA's speed, on my drive to Kingston for Christmas, I was passed by a VIA train near Oshawa (just outside Toronto). The same train passed me again as I was pulling in to a petrol station in Kingston.

 

The Amtrak Northeast Corridor is different in that has a bunch of large cities spread about an hour separation, and so it does actually make sense as a passenger corridor. It helps that Amtrak owns the corridor and that it is electrified (thank the PRR and NH for that).

 

Adrian

[jjb1970]

A while ago I once had to make a trip from Burlington to Ottawa, I asked our office about using VIA and was met with laughter and told to be sensible and they booked a flight. That is just an anecdote but I think it revealed something of some attitudes to rail travel in Canada. I do think rail travel can work in Canada and that there are routes which are viable but I also think that we should be careful about comparing railways in NA with those in Europe as it is comparing apples with pears.