Since the lockdowns have ended, ridership has been steadily returning to Canadian commuter rail lines. But the service levels have not kept pace.
At the start of January 2022, train schedules were nearly at their pre-pandemic levels, but in practice service was much lower due to chronic operator shortages. In Ontario, many trips were cancelled on a regular basis because there wasn’t anyone to operate them. So on the 10th of January, GO implemented drastic service cuts to schedule a service they could actually operate.
The service cuts were nearly as severe as the original service cuts from March 2020. Peak-period service was reduced to half-hourly on the Milton, Kitchener, Stouffville and Barrie lines, and to hourly on the Richmond Hill line. Weekend train service on the Barrie and Stouffville lines was cancelled altogether and replaced with buses. All express trains (on the Kitchener and Lakeshore West lines) were cancelled. And counter-peak service was also cancelled on the Kitchener line. On the Lakeshore lines, off-peak service was cut to half-hourly in the midday, and hourly on evenings and weekends.
At the time, I expected service would start returning to normal within a few months when the wave of operator illnesses passed. But service returned much slower than expected.
In April, half-hourly evening and weekend service was restored on the Lakeshore lines, and weekend service was restored on the Barrie and Stouffville lines.
At the end of the summer tourist season, the number of round trips to Niagara Falls was reduced from 3 to 2, which is a far cry from the 4 round trips which were provided year-round prior to the pandemic.
It wasn’t until December that weekday schedules started to return to normal, with peak period express services restored, and local trains added to increase frequency during the peak hour.
This year’s charts compare the January 2023 service to the service scheduled in December 2021, just prior to the drastic cuts of January 2022.
Frequency
Although service levels have almost returned to normal, there are still some notable deficiencies compared to the Fall 2021 schedule.
The only frequency improvement this year is that 15-minute service was restored on the UP Express, though only during the peak periods. This still falls short of the all-day 15-minute service prior to the pandemic.
On the Lakeshore lines, midday service continues to be every 30 minutes, instead of every 15 minutes. Evening service on the Lakeshore West line is also limited to every 60 minutes due to construction on the Hurontario LRT at Port Credit Station.
The Kitchener line finally regained some counter-peak service to Bramalea in December, but there are still some 90 minute gaps in service.
Peak period frequencies on the Barrie, Milton and Richmond Hill line are also lower than normal. Hopefully additional trips will be continue to be added as new operators begin service.
There were no changes in frequency outside of Ontario.
Speed
With increased ridership come longer dwell times at stations. As a result, many lines had one or two minutes added to their schedules.
But not the Kitchener line. Thanks to Metrolinx’s railway upgrade project between Kitchener and Georgetown, this year’s Kitchener express train is the fastest it’s ever been. In fact, with an average speed of 65 km/h end-to-end, it is the fastest Canadian commuter service ever included in these annual summaries.
While Metrolinx has been upgrading the Toronto-Kitchener railway, CN has allowed the the Kitchener-London railway to continue to deteriorate. Nearly the entire line is affected by speed restrictions due to track quality issues. Only a few segments between Kitchener and Stratford allow trains to reach the 60 mph (96 km/h) line speed, which itself is already lower than the 70 mph (112 km/h) speed limit which was in place until 1996. Trains now take a whopping 2h15 to cover just 90 km from Kitchener to London, which is an hour longer than that trip took in the 1970’s, stopping at the same two stations along the way.
The Mascouche Line somehow managed to get even slower, now taking nearly two hours to get from Mascouche to Montreal, which according to Google Maps is only 15 minutes faster than riding a bicycle. Next year travel times should improve as trains will terminate at the new Côte-de-Liesse REM station where people can transfer to REM line which has taken over the former route of the Mascouche Line through the tunnel Mont-Royal.
