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VIA Rail

roger1818 said:
Where in Montreal is Obico? The only reference I see for Obico is in Toronto.

Optimally, as I said in my original post, it would be on the south shore to allow you to bypass downtown, but both CN and CP have Auto Rack facilities in Côte Saint-Luc yard (CP's seems unused according to Google Maps). CN also seems to have an Auto Rack facility in Moncton.

By Union I assume you mean Central Station and I agree and never suggested that.
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The original conversation seemed to revolve around reinstating a previous service - Toronto to Edmonton.

If you wanted to start an all-new service on The Ocean, fine. Halifax would be relatively easy, pending the ownership of the land around the station. Hell, even Moncton has a lot of land around the station where a loading facility could be located. Where would you load autoracks near Central Station, however? MMC, maybe? And again, is VIA then responsible for getting people from the loading facility to the station?

Dan
 
Allandale25 said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1390392188211712004
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A very interesting read. Some things that stood out to me were:

A business class car with 2+1 seating and two accessible spaces, which will have standard coupler at one end to connect to the locomotive
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I hadn't seen any evidence to indicate if the trains would have a standard or semi-permanent coupler between the front car and the locomotive. I had assumed the latter, but it was never clear. It explains why every train has exactly one Business 3A car.

an intermediate business class car; an economy class car; and an economy car with additional galley space. Both types of economy car will offer accessible spaces and washrooms. The cab cars will also have a galley space, but do not feature a space for checked baggage or packages,
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Interesting to read what facilities each car type will have. Strange the way it says the cab cars "do not feature a space for checked baggage or packages" yet there is no mention of space for checked baggage or packages in any of the other cars. Does that mean they do, but it isn't mentioned, or were they trying to say the trains won't have it? If a standard coupler is indeed used between the locomotive and the first car, I guess they could use a HEP Baggage car on some trains.
 
Bureaucromancer said:
I suspect VIA doesn't particularly want to do checked baggage at all. It's honestly not a common service for corridor services at all..
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You are probably right that VIA doesn't want to do checked baggage, but having one train a day on each route with checked baggage for oversized items does have some value. The new fleet having bike racks will help reduce that need though.
 
roger1818 said:
You are probably right that VIA doesn't want to do checked baggage, but having one train a day on each route with checked baggage for oversized items does have some value. The new fleet having bike racks will help reduce that need though.
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It's a nice service, but the only way I see it as being worth the effort would be some sort of package express service along the lines of what Greyhound used to do... and that would demand much more of a network to be worth anything.

Although I have mused that a Post Bus service could be a decent path to a national bus plan, at which point merging VIA into Canada Post starts to sound sensible...

Joking.

Mostly
 
roger1818 said:
You are probably right that VIA doesn't want to do checked baggage, but having one train a day on each route with checked baggage for oversized items does have some value. The new fleet having bike racks will help reduce that need though.
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I think it would be a shame if Via got away from checked baggage since I think that's one of the big advantages for them over GO trains or coach travel, and I imagine there would be more demand if there was a substantive shift away from domestic flights to rail for routes like Toronto-Montreal. However for HFR which feels like an extended regional rail plan, I imagine a more GO-like commuter and "light travel" orientation would be more practical. I think it's also a question of how we reintroduce/improve station services in Canada (something that I consider one of the poorest parts of intercity rail travel right now) while frequencies and ridership are low, with it being a bit of a catch-22 that poor station services probably also suppress ridership to an extent, and don't necessarily cost as much as big infrastructure improvements on lines.

I think you're right to highlight bikes here because they're likely going to be a big part of car-free leisure travel going forward and these are the kind of people who would help put butts in seats from, say, Toronto to Cobourg, Toronto to Stratford, etc. on weekend and summer runs. The value of being able to just bring bikes onboard is huge especially because it gives a lot more freedom to visit a rural area or small town and not be restricted by poor/nonexistent local transit, so in the long run it could help with numbers for the kind of small-town eastern Ontario stations that see a lot of trains pass through but probably not as many people get on or off.
Bureaucromancer said:
It's a nice service, but the only way I see it as being worth the effort would be some sort of package express service along the lines of what Greyhound used to do... and that would demand much more of a network to be worth anything.

Although I have mused that a Post Bus service could be a decent path to a national bus plan, at which point merging VIA into Canada Post starts to sound sensible...

Joking.

Mostly
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I think there's a conversation to be had that if train speeds and frequencies go up again, an argument could be made for the reintroduction of a Railway Post Office type system and reintegrating postal and railway systems, just like I believe we have room to be more vigorous about rail freight and not letting the trucking industry eat it up. But that would require quite a bit of political will and I imagine you would have institutional resistance in places like Canada Post to an outside-enforced way of doing things. We're also far off from the situation like Germany where they are moving toward rebuilding their freight rail network by having new industrial parks be rail-connected, and simplifying/expediting the process for existing industrial parks to get rail connections retrofitted into their design. Unfortunately, Canada Post has moved to the classic trucking-enabled industrial park distribution centre model and the solution would probably have to be to bring the rail to them, at least in the short term, while also finding some regulatory/incentive-based framework to encourage rail use.
 
The Railway Post Office of olde wasn't just carting mail from A to B: it was an actual rolling post office with sorting, mail dropped and picked up enroute and, I believe staffed with postal employees and had a relatively high level of security. With centralized and automated sorting I don't see that happening. Even if it was just some kind of mail cartage service, it would have to be either a piece of rolling stock that is marshalled into/out of the train or hand-bombed at both ends.
 
^At today’s labour rates, any mail or parcel business would have to be intermodal to minimise handling and manual sorting. I can’t imagine VIA acquiring enough capital to underwrite the sorting and tracking equipment. And such a business would be a huge managerial distraction, even if it brought in revenue.
Railway Post Office cars (and storage mail cars, of which there was plenty but less apparent - just boxcar style bulk haulage) made sense while the train station was adjacent to a main post office, but once one adds a first mile/last mile trip.....

- Paul
 
If I understand correctly, the HFR plan is modeled off the conventional intercity rail services found throughout western europe and these services rarely offer checked baggage. While I do not have the statistics from VIA, I understand that the fraction of total passengers using checked baggage on corridor trips is low; especially because most trains do not offer it. While checked baggage can be a nice service to offer, it is my understanding that the need for it can be almost entirely eliminated through good design of passenger carrying railcars. Personally, I would much rather carry my luggage (and bike if I traveled with one) directly onto the train with level boarding instead of arriving early to make the 30 minute baggage drop off and waiting again at the destination.

Also, does anybody know why the current double ended trains still reverse out of Central Station rather than switching ends? Is there a complex procedure that needs to be followed to change which engine is used for control? Does that mean that the rear engine is just a dead weight until the terminus?
 
ManyQuestions said:
Also, does anybody know why the current double ended trains still reverse out of Central Station rather than switching ends? Is there a complex procedure that needs to be followed to change which engine is used for control? Does that mean that the rear engine is just a dead weight until the terminus?
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If VIA was unable to reverse the direction of their trains, this would defeat the purpose of running trains with a locomotive on both sides. Given that a change in train/car/seat orientation seems to be no problem in-between different revenue moves (e.g. TRTO-62-MTRL-69-TRTO), but is avoided half-way through one and the same revenue move (e.g. OTTW-26-MTRL-26-QBEC), this points more towards an IT constraint (e.g. in managing the fleet and seat allocation) than any technical constraints of the physical fleet…
 
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Urban Sky said:
If VIA was unable to reverse the direction of their trains, this would defeat the purpose of running trains with a locomotive on both sides. Given that a change in train/car/seat orientation seems to be no problem in-between different revenue moves (e.g. TRTO-62-MTRL-69-TRTO), but is avoided half-way through one and the same revenue move (e.g. OTTW-26-MTRL-26-QBEC), this points more towards an IT constraint (e.g. in managing the fleet and seat allocation) than any technical constraints of the physical fleet…
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Could it be a customer satisfaction issue, whereby people want to be assured of a forward facing seat for the entire trip? Seems odd though as the time savings of not having to use the wye mid way trough the trip should compensate for that.
 
roger1818 said:
Could it be a customer satisfaction issue, whereby people want to be assured of a forward facing seat for the entire trip? Seems odd though as the time savings of not having to use the wye mid way trough the trip should compensate for that.
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There are good reasons why VIA currently replaces its ancient reservation system with one which has actually been designed for the passenger rail industry…
 
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trebello said:
Wonder what impact, if any, this will have on VIA's corridor services. I suspect almost all Greyhound passengers will move to other bus services, but I can also see it helping ridership for VIA in post-pandemic southern Ontario/Quebec
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I think that with Greyhound not coming back, western ontario now will need more VIA service to make it easier for people to travel, especially past London.
 
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