VIA Rail

[steveintoronto]

It might take a sharp knife to do some cutting before HFR can be a healthy birth. The money losers have to be fire-walled from the winners/potential-winners.

And over half a century later, here's the other side of that coin in the UK: (and although the various railway acts are different from Canada's, similarities exist in laws protecting the RoWs):

Axed rail routes may be reopened under new Department for Transport plans
The announcement will give fresh hope to campaign groups, who are still fighting to restore services cut more than 50 years ago.

By Mark White, home affairs correspondent (Sky News)

The Department for Transport has confirmed it is actively working with a number of groups to explore the possibility of reopening old rail routes, axed under the so-called Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

It follows a call by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling a year ago, encouraging those in the public and private sector to submit proposals for potential projects to regenerate old lines.
The announcement will give fresh hope to dozens of campaign groups across the UK, who are still fighting to restore services cut more than half a century ago.

A spokesman for the Department for Transport told Sky News: "We are continuing to grow the rail network to deliver improvements for passengers, unlock new housing and support the economy, including by exploring opportunities to restore previously lost capacity.
"We have received a wide variety of proposals to enhance the railway from across the public and private sector, and are working with promoters to explore opportunities to re-open routes cut under Beeching.
"This is on top of exploring reopening the Northumberland Line for passenger use, supporting the reinstatement of stations on the Camp Hill Line, developing new rail links to Heathrow and a new station at Cambridge South."
The spokesman said that due to the confidentiality issues around its market-led approach, the department was not yet in a position to release details of the proposed projects, but hoped to be able to provide more information in the year ahead.
[...continues in extensive article...]

https://news.sky.com/story/axed-rai...er-new-department-of-transport-plans-11591282

Like it or not, (I see it as one of the few ways forward in tight gov't fiscal times) the private, or P3 ("Market Driven") model is working elsewhere. Desjardins-Siciliano has this right for HFR.

 

[Urban Sky]

When I read this, it looks like VIA is bleeding money everywhere. No route breaks even or makes more than it costs..

The figures provided in VIA Rail's Annual Reports for the Corridor do not provide any figures at a route-level (except for "Toronto-Niagara", i.e. trains #97 and #98), as "Quebec-Montreal-Ottawa" includes QBEC-MTRL and MTRL-OTTW (i.e. train numbers 20-39 and 620-639), "Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto" includes MTRL-TRTO, OTTW-TRTO and KGON-TRTO (i.e. train numbers 40-69 and 640-669) and "Toronto-London-Sarnia-Windsor) includes TRTO-BRTF-LNDN-WDON and TRTO-KITC-LNDN-SARN (i.e. train numbers 70-89). For instance, it appears reasonable to expect that the cost recovery for TRTO-BRTF-LNDN-WDON (i.e. trains 70-83) is significantly higher than for TRTO-KITC-LNDN-SARN (i.e. trains 84/85/87/88), given that the former has much better frequencies and travel times than the latter.

Furthermore, the cost and revenue figures are so-called "fully allocated" costs, which means that costs include direct (e.g. train-operating) as well as indirect (e.g. administrative) costs, while revenues include direct (e.g. ticket sales) as well as indirect (e.g. station or infrastructure) revenues. Given that indirect costs includes things like the salaries for almost the entire HQ (including the one I receive), which are most probably significantly higher than indirect revenues (such as rent payments of merchants at VIA stations or track access charges received for freight trains using VIA trackage), indirect costs may escalate the "avoidable" costs (i.e. the costs directly associated with operating trains) by much more than indirect revenues escalate direct (e.g. ticket or on-board) revenues. This means that even though a service is reported in the Annual Report with a higher cost than revenue figure (i.e. with a nominal deficit), this does not automatically mean that withdrawing that service would reduce VIA's subsidy need, as the share of the net indirect costs (i.e. indirect costs minus indirect revenues) currently absorbed by this service will now have to be re-allocated across the remaining services.

I wonder what it would take to make it break even on at least the Corridor.

This is of course a purely mathematical exercise, but if we extrapolate the trends of the last 3 years into the future, Corridor services would break even in 2030:

Compiled and extrapolated from: VIA Rail Annual Reports 2014 and 2017

Note how by that time (2030), train-, car- and seat-miles would have increase by a factor of 1.5, 2 and 2.5, respectively, compared to 2017, while the approximate growth factor for ridership passenger-mileage would be 2 and 2.5, respectively. Unfortunately, such a continued growth of frequencies and train sizes would reach the limits imposed by the host railways, the availability of the fleet and its utilisation much earlier than 2030, which underlines the urgent need for the two main projects currently pursued by VIA Rail: the current fleet replacement (including the option for a fleet expansion) and High-Frequency Rail...

Edit (2018-12-31): I've updated the table (and the paragraph underneath the table) to include ridership data. Note that the operational metrics refer to the entire network (i.e. including the transcontinental and regional routes), as no separate figures are provided for the Corridor...

 

[asher__jo]

When I read this, it looks like VIA is bleeding money everywhere. No route breaks even or makes more than it costs.. I wonder what it would take to make it break even on at least the Corridor.

Well crown corps aren't really intended to make a profit. That's really something private companies have to be concerned with because of shareholders.

 

[Urban Sky]

Well crown corps aren't really intended to make a profit. That's really something private companies have to be concerned with because of shareholders.

Even a fully-owned subsidiary has shareholders to satisfy: those of its parent holding. In the case of a federal Crown Corporation, the number of individual shareholders is even much higher than with virtually any private-sector organisation in the world (36 million Canadian citizens/residents and taxpayers). The only difference to private institutions is that this category of shareholders assesses their "investment" with a social rather than a purely financial benefit-cost analysis, even though the scope of that assessment (myself, my family, my community, my municipality, my region, my province, my country, my planet) varies significantly among them...

 

[asher__jo]

Even a fully-owned subsidiary has shareholders to satisfy: those of its parent holding. In the case of a federal Crown Corporation, the number of individual shareholders is even much higher than with virtually any private-sector organisation in the world (36 million Canadian citizens/residents and taxpayers). The only difference to private institutions is that this category of shareholders assesses their "investment" with a social rather than a purely financial benefit-cost analysis, even though the scope of that assessment (myself, my family, my community, my municipality, my region, my province, my country, my planet) varies significantly among them...

I won't get in depth, but generally no public transit forms are ever profitable. And profit is really a poor form of measuring it's worth in my opinion.

 

[Urban Sky]

I won't get in depth, but generally no public transit forms are ever profitable. And profit is really a poor form of measuring it's worth in my opinion.

I'm not sure you understood what a "Social Benefit-Cost Analysis" entails: whereas a financial benefit-cost analysis merely compares the financial outflows (i.e. costs) and inflows (i.e. revenues) of an organisation, a social benefit-cost analysis tries to assess all impacts (monetary and non-monetary) onto overall society (i.e. concerning all stakeholders of the project, not just the shareholders). In the case of public transit, this includes the impact of the investment in question on things like environment, economy or health. Therefore, a social benefit-cost analysis of intercity rail acknowledges that the investment may reduce the amount of CO2- or other greenhouse-emissions, lifetime wasted unproductively in congestion (instead of productively at work), lost economic output as consequence of accidents, healthcare spending (as result of lower greenhouse-emissions) compared to its potential riders using more polluting modes.

As you can see in this analysis of four major HSR corridors in Spain, a social benefit-cost analysis can lead to significantly different results than a purely financial one, even though this does not change that some projects (even passenger rail ones) can simply not be justified by any standard (as a negative social BCR reveals that you would be doing more damage than good with that project):

 

[Northern Light]

I'm not sure you understood what a "Social Benefit-Cost Analysis" entails: whereas a financial benefit-cost analysis merely compares the financial outflows (i.e. costs) and inflows (i.e. revenues) of an organisation, a social benefit-cost analysis tries to assess all impacts (monetary and non-monetary) onto overall society (i.e. concerning all stakeholders of the project, not just the shareholders). In the case of public transit, this includes the impact of the investment in question on things like environment, economy or health. Therefore, a social benefit-cost analysis of intercity rail acknowledges that the investment may reduce the amount of CO2- or other greenhouse-emissions, lifetime wasted unproductively in congestion (instead of productively at work), lost economic output as consequence of accidents, healthcare spending (as result of lower greenhouse-emissions) compared to its potential riders using more polluting modes.

As you can see in this analysis of four major HSR corridors in Spain, a social benefit-cost analysis can lead to significantly different results than a purely financial one, even though this does not change that some projects (even passenger rail ones) can simply not be justified by any standard:
View attachment 168869

Excellent info, but you do realize @asher__jo is already in agreement with you, right? At least by my reading (I will stand to be corrected if applicable)

The argument is profit alone is a poor way to measure VALUE to the citizens of a country, or residents of an area.

Crown corporations have a broader mandate, and a subsidy is permissible cost of doing business, where the value justifies it.

Though I will add here that transit, that is to say public transport by rail, can be profitable, as Hong Kong demonstrates. Though that is urban, a relatively rare case, and the profit-centre is real estate development not the actual rail service per se.

 

[Urban Sky]

Excellent info, but you do realize @asher__jo is already in agreement with you, right? At least by my reading (I will stand to be corrected if applicable)

The argument is profit alone is a poor way to measure VALUE to the citizens of a country, or residents of an area.

Crown corporations have a broader mandate, and a subsidy is permissible cost of doing business, where the value justifies it.

Though I will add here that transit, that is to say public transport by rail, can be profitable, as Hong Kong demonstrates. Though that is urban, a relatively rare case, and the profit-centre is real estate development not the actual rail service per se.

I know that we are all in agreement, my point was simply that the concept of "social profit" includes all those considerations (also known as "external effects" or "externalises") which you rightly accuse the concept of "financial profit" of treating them with ignorance. That said: projects which have a negative social profit (i.e. a social loss, represented by a Social BCR lower than 1) should never be pursued, as they by definition do more bad than good...

 

[asher__jo]

I know that we are all in agreement, my point was simply that the concept of "social profit" includes all those considerations (also known as "external effects" or "externalises") which you rightly accuse the concept of "financial profit" of treating them with ignorance. That said: projects which have a negative social profit (i.e. a social loss, represented by a Social BCR lower than 1) should never be pursued, as they by definition do more bad than good...

My point was that people expecting the conventional definition of a profitable public transit/commuter service to be profitable is missing the point. So I was really addressing something adjacent to the methods of calculating social benefit.

 

[crs1026]

^Those Hansard transcripts that were cited earlier were interesting - at one point a Senator (who was clearly very well primed by the airline industry) made the claim that the air infrastructure in Canada, and specifically in the T-O-M corridors, was self-funding and running in the black. (The inference being that Ottawa is anti-airline if it chooses to subsidise VIA in a way that hurt air travel demand). This may be partly true from some narrow perspective, but investment in the air sector is government subsidised, in the same way and for the same reasons. eg Perhaps GTAA or Dorval is self funding on an avoidable cost basis from user fees, but I doubt the airport in Churchill Man ever will be.

Thanks @UrbanSky for reminding us of the facts around cost recovery, which we often drift away from as we discuss. I had no idea that the Canadian’s cost recovery was that high.... although, even there, no one is suggesting that VIA could raise capital for new equipment in a P3 arrangement. And winter is different from summer.

Personally I have no objection to subsidy in transportation, and I believe that overtly or otherwise, all modes get it. But politics in this country view subsidy as waste (which is why subsidy to other modes is so carefully hidden). Somehow VIA gets the harshest accounting treatment relative to other modes. Quantifying a subsidy is an accountant’s mug’s game and has so many variables that I don’t even want to debate it, but unquestionably VIA’s corridor operation has a cost recovery that we ought to be proud of.

- Paul

 

[Admiral Beez]

Great info and pics, thanks for posting that.

The big problems with car transport on passenger trains is that the loading and unloading of automobiles takes so much time that it is only practical at the origin or destination of a passenger train and that the train length makes stops at intermediate stations impractical:

My thinking was exclusively for motorcycles rather than cars. Motorcycles can be loaded onto a freight car that accompanies the train. I've taken the Agawa Canyon train and the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee and in both cases the train would stop to embark or alight canoes and other camping gear. I see no reason beyond ensuring the fuel is secure that motorcycles cannot be accommodated.

 

[steveintoronto]

My thinking was exclusively for motorcycles rather than cars. Motorcycles can be loaded onto a freight car that accompanies the train.

VIA doesn't take bicycles unless there's a baggage car (rare) let alone motorbikes, albeit the new Siemens coaches are reputed to have a dedicated space for bikes without being in boxes as required for the baggage car.

 

[micheal_can]

Great info and pics, thanks for posting that.My thinking was exclusively for motorcycles rather than cars. Motorcycles can be loaded onto a freight car that accompanies the train. I've taken the Agawa Canyon train and the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee and in both cases the train would stop to embark or alight canoes and other camping gear. I see no reason beyond ensuring the fuel is secure that motorcycles cannot be accommodated.

Securing a motorcycle for a trip on a train is more than just securing the fuel. As the train jostles around, there is a potential for the motorcycle to fall over. If mine fell over during transport, you can bet I would be pissed.

 

[Urban Sky]

Great info and pics, thanks for posting that.My thinking was exclusively for motorcycles rather than cars. Motorcycles can be loaded onto a freight car that accompanies the train. I've taken the Agawa Canyon train and the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee and in both cases the train would stop to embark or alight canoes and other camping gear. I see no reason beyond ensuring the fuel is secure that motorcycles cannot be accommodated.

"Freight car" might be the key word here. These trains might be classified as a "mixed" train (not sure for the Agawa Canyon, but I believe the Polar Bear Express is). Also, both trains fall under provincial instead of federal jurisdiction, which might have consequences for what the operator may allow passengers to transport on-board the train and what not...

VIA doesn't take bicycles unless there's a baggage car (rare) let alone motorbikes, albeit the new Siemens coaches are reputed to have a dedicated space for bikes without being in boxes as required for the baggage car.

Here a picture of a bicycle rack in the Railjet, which are quite representative of bicycle transport facilities in European trains:

https://nationaler-radverkehrsplan....ebb-statten-railjets-mit-fahrrad-abteilen-aus

Securing a motorcycle for a trip on a train is more than just securing the fuel. As the train jostles around, there is a potential for the motorcycle to fall over. If mine fell over during transport, you can bet I would be pissed.

This might explain why "Motorized vehicles, such as snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles or personal watercraft" are allowed on trains 185 and 186 (Sudbury - White River), while there is no mention of Motorcycles:

https://www.viarail.ca/en/travel-info/baggage/checked-baggage

 

[steveintoronto]

Here a picture of a bicycle rack in the Railjet, which are quite representative of bicycle transport facilities in European trains:

https://nationaler-radverkehrsplan....ebb-statten-railjets-mit-fahrrad-abteilen-aus

I expect the demand for these will be so high as to need a reservation for the available spaces. I can barely wait...It will attract a lot of cyclists like myself. The US southwest commuter trains (and perhaps elsewhere) also offer similar, let alone Amtrak.

Amtrak Expands Bike Service
Amtrak is always looking for ways to make our customers’ experiences on board even better.

We continue to add bike transportation options to our routes, and want to update you on the ways you can use Amtrak to take you to the many beautiful biking trails America has to offer, or to the next big race.

Recently, we’ve partnered with organizations within the biking community to accommodate bikes on some of our routes. This task force has advised us on the needs of the biking community, as well as how important easy and accessible bike service is to intercity and cross country transportation. Curious about the places that Amtrak can take you and your bike to? We break down the basics of bike storage and transportation on Amtrak:

There are three types of bike service that Amtrak provides:

1. Walk-Up or Checked Bicycle Service: Standard full-size bicycles may be transported in bicycle racks located in the baggage car. Passengers are not allowed in baggage cars, so Amtrak personnel will store and secure your bike in the bike racks. This service is only available at select stations. Advance reservations are required.
2. Walk-On Bicycle Service: Standard full-size bicycles may be carried on and stored on board in bicycle racks on these select certain trains.
3. Boxed Bicycles in Checked Baggage: Bicycles may be checked on Amtrak between all cities where checked baggage is offered. Not all trains or locations are equipped to handle checked baggage. Find your station(s) to see if this service is available.

[...]
For more information on pricing and route availability, check out our bike information pagefor the latest updates.

http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/11/amtrak-expands-bike-service/