Quebec-Windsor Corridor

[PL1]

^ Nobody likes to say it out loud. But the Ford government offers the template here. They've cut back on social spending to facilitate infrastructure spending. When you pay for infrastructure you get to cut ribbons. When you mail a cheque or give a tax break you don't get much public recognition. Ontario Tories recognized this. And in a $450B federal budget, there is room to be able to fund a $2-4B annual spend on HSR construction over 6-8 years. Just means some difficult choices.

But then everyone notices the social problems with the lack of spending. There's a whole thread on the issue of homelessness on the TTC.

And for a supposedly fiscally conservative government, they have done a poor job of managing the public purse: structural deficits here (cut to gas tax and eliminating license plate renewals), extra spending there (look! A highway! Let's spend millions to fight a losing battle to stop paying public employees properly!).

But the dog and pony show sure makes for a good photo op

 

[kEiThZ]

But then everyone notices the social problems with the lack of spending. There's a whole thread on the issue of homelessness on the TTC.

And for a supposedly fiscally conservative government, they have done a poor job of managing the public purse: structural deficits here (cut to gas tax and eliminating license plate renewals), extra spending there (look! A highway! Let's spend millions to fight a losing battle to stop paying public employees properly!).

But the dog and pony show sure makes for a good photo op

I'm not going to suggest that it's the ideal strategy. I'm suggesting that Ford offers a template for how conservative governments can invest in infrastructure.

There's always going to be tradeoffs. If we don't want to increase taxes, then we have to pick between infrastructure and social services. And for conservative governments, infrastructure that most people could theoretically benefit from will be preferable.

People forget a bit of history with Harper here. When he first got elected, he created the transit tax credit instead of more direct transit funding. Popular as that was, eventually they did go on to funding transit construction with the "Economic Action Plan" because his MPs did want some ribbon cuttings after all. I expect similar pressures within a PP tory government. But we might have a few years of austerity before we get to that point.

 

[lenaitch]

On another note, as I was driving the Trans Canada to Montreal down the Ottawa Valley, I was pondering the lost economic opportunities of the rail line connecting North Bay to Ottawa, Montreal and points east. I think my next vehicle should have a HUD display and functionality incorporating Microsoft Office….

One thing we don't do well, if at all, in this country, is maintain supply chains and infrastructure that are deemed vial to the nation's strategic interest. The US has 'strategic reserves ' of all sorts of things. The US Interstate Highway System was rolled out as necessary for the strategic defence of the country. Other nations have Merchant Navies of domestically-flagged commercial ships that can be called into national service.

Both CN and CPKC abandoned their Ottawa Valley routes because the found them to be financially redundant. Now, all east-west rail traffic goes through Toronto and, the domestic (non-US) routes run so closely aligned that in a few places that they throw rocks at each other. Maintaining at least one Ottawa Valley route would have ensured a degree of redundancy. This would have required government financial support.

 

[Bordercollie]

One thing we don't do well, if at all, in this country, is maintain supply chains and infrastructure that are deemed vial to the nation's strategic interest. The US has 'strategic reserves ' of all sorts of things. The US Interstate Highway System was rolled out as necessary for the strategic defence of the country. Other nations have Merchant Navies of domestically-flagged commercial ships that can be called into national service.

Both CN and CPKC abandoned their Ottawa Valley routes because the found them to be financially redundant. Now, all east-west rail traffic goes through Toronto and, the domestic (non-US) routes run so closely aligned that in a few places that they throw rocks at each other. Maintaining at least one Ottawa Valley route would have ensured a degree of redundancy. This would have required government financial support.

They could upgrade the York Sub to be double tracked the entire way giving more capacity to by-pass Toronto. The Belleville sub is not even close to being at capacity so shared running would also allow you to bypass Toronto. ONR has a northern route bypassing Toronto also but is also not at capacity.

So I guess that tells you that we don't have a bottleneck.

 

[Urban Sky]

They could upgrade the York Sub to be double tracked the entire way giving more capacity to by-pass Toronto. The Belleville sub is not even close to being at capacity so shared running would also allow you to bypass Toronto. ONR has a northern route bypassing Toronto also but is also not at capacity.

So I guess that tells you that we don't have a bottleneck.

The problem is not rail capacity, but fluidity (e.g., VIA trains stuck behind freight trains) and operational flexibility (e.g., the availability of alternative routes if derailments or blockades make certain parts of the core network unavailable). CN and CP(KC) have attached a cost to these events, multiplied it with their estimated likelihood and apparently determined that avoiding these risks was not enough to justify the costs of even maintaining a single, shared line along the Ottawa Valley…

 

[smallspy]

One thing we don't do well, if at all, in this country, is maintain supply chains and infrastructure that are deemed vial to the nation's strategic interest. The US has 'strategic reserves ' of all sorts of things. The US Interstate Highway System was rolled out as necessary for the strategic defence of the country. Other nations have Merchant Navies of domestically-flagged commercial ships that can be called into national service.

Both CN and CPKC abandoned their Ottawa Valley routes because the found them to be financially redundant. Now, all east-west rail traffic goes through Toronto and, the domestic (non-US) routes run so closely aligned that in a few places that they throw rocks at each other. Maintaining at least one Ottawa Valley route would have ensured a degree of redundancy. This would have required government financial support.

And yet, there are no "strategic railways" in the US - because, much like our rail network, their rail system is almost entirely privatized. And much like their interstate highway system, our highways are publicly owned. There is a parallel between the two countries.

So what exactly are you railing for, here?

Dan

 

[crs1026]

The Ottawa Valley exercise was not just about raw cost numbers. There was a coproduction scheme that almost reached the finish line, but it arrived just as CN was being privatised. Implementing such a large co-production scheme while trying to sell CN as a competitive business shedding its public sector culture was too mixed a message.
The premise that competing railroads can’t or shouldn’t collaborate is widely held by government and investors alike.

- Paul

 

[lenaitch]

They could upgrade the York Sub to be double tracked the entire way giving more capacity to by-pass Toronto. The Belleville sub is not even close to being at capacity so shared running would also allow you to bypass Toronto. ONR has a northern route bypassing Toronto also but is also not at capacity.

So I guess that tells you that we don't have a bottleneck.

Which misses the entire point of my post. The concept of 'strategic interest' is protecting or hardening critical infrastructure to ensure the health of the nation, measured as economical, physical, etc. It is related to the economic interest of private companies and day-to-day goods movement, but that is not the driver. Without getting into terrorism or international conflict, if the Mohawk blockade of a few years ago had moved just a tad west, they could have shut down both rail corridors.

I'm not sure I get the point of ONR bypassing Toronto; it is nowhere near Toronto. It is true that it was used by CN to move some traffic, but I doubt that circuitous routing through northern Quebec has anywhere near the capacity to take up the mainline slack of one let alone both Class 1s.

Even if alternative routes in Ontario had been maintained, there is still a convergence in the Montreal area (I don't know the layout that well). Ever since CN abandoned their 'northern line to Quebec City (former National Transcontinental) which ran straight to Quebec City, east-west rail options in this country have been limited.

I get why the railways reduced their redundancies; they exist to make money. Maintaining redundant routes for nation reasons would have required national money.

 

[lenaitch]

And yet, there are no "strategic railways" in the US - because, much like our rail network, their rail system is almost entirely privatized. And much like their interstate highway system, our highways are publicly owned. There is a parallel between the two countries.

So what exactly are you railing for, here?

Dan

"Railing for": I like that, well done.

The concept of national strategic interest or sovereignty has multiple facets; it can be digital, monetary, economic, infrastructure, etc. Checking a map, the US has multiple ways to move goods and people east-west or north-south, simply by virtue of their population distribution, either by road or rail. It doesn't necessarily have to be owned by the state, it simply has to exist. I doubt they have tight convergences like we do. Even our east-west highway network is extremely constricted in a couple of spots in northern Ontario.

Slightly off-topic, and not wanting to get into military matters, if off-shore events got to point where we we needed to move (what's left of) our heavy assets such as armour overseas, I'm not sure many, or even any of the bases where they are lodged even have rail any more. Sure, you can truck them to tidewater or fly them - one or two at a time. I'll bet most large US military bases and ports have rail. The US Army Transportation Corps still has a rail operations division but doesn't own an inch of track off its property.

I have similar concerns about things like critical data being stored in the cloud or the state of our domestically held gold reserves.

This is all way off-topic for this thread. I spent some time in disaster management so still tend to think along those lines. The basic concept of disaster/emergency management, disaster recovery, etc. is 'how do we keep doing or get back to doing that which is critically important', and 'critically important' depends on the organization. It's why hospitals, sewage plants, etc. have, or should have, back-up generators. A buddy did his career in a large tech company. Long before work-from-home was a thing, that company determined that the best way to deal with a disruption in normal business was to issue key employees with laptops and pay for their internet.

I'm not saying that the government should break the bank on this kind of stuff, but they should at least consider its implications. I will bet a pension cheque that the national interest in having all commercial rail traffic routed through Toronto when the carriers applied to close down their Ottawa Valley routes wasn't even discussed.

If you've ever read Tom Clancy (his earlier works, the latter ones were ghost-written and crap), in Red Storm Rising, the Red Army's ability to move eastern assets to the Western Europe boiled down to a single rail switch in a yard outside of Moscow.

 

[dowlingm]

And yet, there are no "strategic railways" in the US - because, much like our rail network, their rail system is almost entirely privatized. And much like their interstate highway system, our highways are publicly owned. There is a parallel between the two countries.

So what exactly are you railing for, here?

Dan

Federally, that’s correct (although in other times perhaps Amtrak would have been differently created), but we have seen state ownership assert in the example of the (post-1989) NCRR, no? State rail entities in turn facilitate federally supported but state led efforts like VA and NC’s divvy up of the S-Line.

The problem of the federal power not asserting it is shown in the Ottawa Valley where an Ontario led effort could have linked North Bay and Ottawa (by retaining some combination of the CN and CP routings) and thereby Sudbury/SSM/Michigan but a large beneficiary of that effort would presumably have been Montreal Port and what’s in that for Ontario?

 

[micheal_can]

Federally, that’s correct (although in other times perhaps Amtrak would have been differently created), but we have seen state ownership assert in the example of the (post-1989) NCRR, no? State rail entities in turn facilitate federally supported but state led efforts like VA and NC’s divvy up of the S-Line.

The problem of the federal power not asserting it is shown in the Ottawa Valley where an Ontario led effort could have linked North Bay and Ottawa (by retaining some combination of the CN and CP routings) and thereby Sudbury/SSM/Michigan but a large beneficiary of that effort would presumably have been Montreal Port and what’s in that for Ontario?

What I heard is that OVR wanted to keep the line through the Ottawa Valley, but CP did not want the completion from the West to Montreal, so they abandoned it. The OVR uses the old CP line.

 

[Urban Sky]

What I heard is that OVR wanted to keep the line through the Ottawa Valley, but CP did not want the completion from the West to Montreal, so they abandoned it. The OVR uses the old CP line.

The abandonment process does not allow for the removal of tracks without offering it for sale to any potentially interested railroad for basically the scrap value of its assets. Had the OVR really been interested in that rail corridor, they could have just purchased it…

 

[micheal_can]

The abandonment process does not allow for the removal of tracks without offering it for sale to any potentially interested railroad for basically the scrap value of its assets. Had the OVR really been interested in that rail corridor, they could have just purchased it…

Thank you for putting that rumor to rest.
That tells me that whomever was looking at it, if anyone did, did not see a financial value to it.

 

[dowlingm]

The abandonment process does not allow for the removal of tracks without offering it for sale to any potentially interested railroad for basically the scrap value of its assets. Had the OVR really been interested in that rail corridor, they could have just purchased it…

That assumes they had the financial wherewithal to absorb and maintain that purchase alone. Corridors of this sort should not come down to chance, just as the province should acquire the HCR if the current ownership walks away,

Edit: I forgot that OVR was a G&W division. So they probably had the means, but their owners likely did not care to spend their own money.

 

[lenaitch]

That assumes they had the financial wherewithal to absorb and maintain that purchase alone. Corridors of this sort should not come down to chance, just as the province should acquire the HCR if the current ownership walks away,

Edit: I forgot that OVR was a G&W division. So they probably had the means, but their owners likely did not care to spend their own money.

If I understand G&W's business model, they expect their railways to financially stand on their own merits.

OVR, like most other shortlines, simply leases the railway from CPKC. Prior to abandonment, their revenue was bridge traffic for CP. Once CP decided to route everything through Toronto, the line made no financial sense. South of Mattawa (Temiskaming) there was very little revenue. I don't know the abandonment process intimately, but I would assume that if it was being sold to an operating railway, it would go for more than scrap value.

Short of nationalization or some other form of public support, for-profit companies will act like for-profit companies.