Dan416
Senior Member
FWIW Bob Delaney, MPP for Mississauga Streetsville mentioned in his mailing that Milton has 8 trains in and out now, which is going to 9 later this year, and 10 next year. That's definitely some progress on the Milton line!
They're probably waiting for the GEXR lease to run out before transferring them over.
What I heard seems like it may be a bit more immediate.
I wouldn't be surprised if it happened. If a sale agreement between CN, GEXR and GO can be reached, screw the lease. CN and Metrolinx have already negotiated plenty of corridor transfers under Greg Percy's leadership, and I'm sure GEXR's holding company wouldn't be opposed to maintaining their current access with a public sector body maintaining the corridor.
GEXR would love the move, as it save the bottom line and having a higher speed limit for them.
No, they wouldn't, actually.
To have another owner would restrict the ability for them to schedule their operations when they want (and thus have to pay more for labour), and would also prevent them from writing off their "investments" in track and fixed plant.
From what I've been hearing, Rail America was actually looking at taking over ownership of the whole of the line when the lease was up in 3 years. GO purchasing the line, even just from Georgetown to Kitchener, may cause them to rethink their investments here.
Its a win win for everyone and maybe part of the announcement schedule for KW next week. The KW LRT is supposed to be part of that announcement as well hwy 7.
Yes, they'd lose some control over scheduling, but it's quite possible that Metrolinx would increase the line capacity to a degree that more than offsets it in flexibility. With the current single-track layout with very few sidings, the GEXR's operations are remarkably constrained, so it wouldn't be too hard for Metrolinx to maintain this (low) level of freedom for them.
The line may be configured so that you see GEXR's operations as being "remarkably constrained", but it also happens to be perfectly suited for what they do today. Metrolinx has also been quite firm about when freight trains can use their single-track lines elsewhere (between the end of the evening rush and beginning of the following morning rush), and it stands to reason that they would impose the same restrictions on GEXR as well.