Bordercollie
Senior Member
Is there a way to turn the train at New Carlisle?
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VIA Rail
- Thread starter ehlow
- Start date
nfitz
Superstar
There used to be a Y to turn a short one. Or an engine. Who knows what shape the track is in now though.
TerryJohnson
New Member
Presumably that work being done tot reinstate the line will take care of that, in addition to restoring respectable track speeds along the route.
The question is whether VIA Rail has enough long-distance equipment without the Rens, the short answer to which is "no" although making-do with far too few resources is something VIA Rail has been forced to become very good at.
A daytime train to connect with Ocean would be one option, although it makes a for a bleary-eyed transfer at Matapedia before breakfast going east, or could a separate coach-only service just about make it from Gaspe to Quebec City for a late evening arrival?
roger1818
Senior Member
Some back of the napkin math, using a 2011 schedule, puts a theoretical trip from Quebec City to Gaspé at about 15 hours (which works out to an average speed of 55 km/h). That seems a bit long for a daytime train, so unless the track has been upgraded to allow it to run faster, I don't think it would be feasible.
lenaitch
Senior Member
I think the argument being made was a connection to the Ocean at Matepedia, not a direct run.
According to the map, it seems there would be no way to turn an entire train at New Carlisle; the short tail track of the wye butts up to the shoreline.
UrbanJon
New Member
I wonder if rather than restoring the Chaleur, if a bus connection to the Ocean would be preferable. Why does Gaspe get VIA service but Sault Ste Marie doesn't? What about Sydney NS for that matter? Maybe Ontario and Nova Scotia should threaten to secede and they would get millions from the feds to invest in lightly used rail lines. It just goes to show that Quebec gets massively preferential treatment while the rest of the country is left to rot.
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tmlittle
Active Member
Yeah, why is that? It's almost like Sault Ste. Marie should have rail service, not that Gaspe shouldn't. This kind of thinking is a race to the bottom.
UrbanJon
New Member
Normally, I would concede that you are right, but here's the thing; Every time a service similar to this was suggested on this forum, it was met with derision. It was always said that a train doesn't need to go everywhere and that a bus could do the job. Why the logical inconsistency?
Urban Sky
Senior Member
Quite frankly, I would have expected a bit more humility from someone who (apparently) lives in a province which commands 38.3% of this country's population, but receives something like 54% of its service:
Note: re-post from the "High Speed Rail: London - Kitchener-Waterloo - Pearson Airport - Toronto" thread
Similarly, it is quite telling that it's reliably Ontarians who resent Quebeckers for the supposedly preferential treatment they are receiving, even though their share of Corridor services has consistently dropped to now only one-half (!) of what would be proportional to its relative population size:
Note: re-post from Post #5,946
VIA's HQ may be located in Quebec, but it's heart definitely beats in Ontario...
***
Hmm, let me think: maybe because Sault Ste. Marie is not exactly the highest priority, given that there are 46 Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Areas larger than SSM, amongst which no less than 16 population centers have also lost their passenger rail services many years ago, including 4 provincial capitals (and, as a side note, 3 cities from Quebec, but only two from Ontario and one from Nova Scotia)?
| Rank | Name of CMA/CA | Population (2020 est.) | (vs. SSM) | Fate of passenger rail service | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Calgary | Alberta | 1,543,283 | 19x | VIA service cancelled in 1990 |
| 15 | Victoria | British Columbia | 408,883 | 5.0x | VIA service suspended in 2011 |
| 18 | Regina | Saskatchewan | 263,184 | 3.2x | VIA service cancelled in 1990 |
| 19 | Sherbrooke | Quebec | 224,557 | 2.8x | VIA service cancelled in 1994 |
| 20 | Kelowna | British Columbia | 222,748 | 2.7x | CP service cancelled in 1964 |
| 22 | St. John's | Newfoundland and Labrador | 214,014 | 2.6x | CN service cancelled in 1984 |
| 28 | Trois-Rivières | Quebec | 163,287 | 2.0x | VIA service cancelled in 1990 |
| 31 | Peterborough | Ontario | 131,939 | 1.6x | VIA service cancelled in 1990 |
| 32 | Saint John | New Brunswick | 131,772 | 1.6x | VIA service cancelled in 1994 |
| 33 | Lethbridge | Alberta | 128,851 | 1.6x | CP service cancelled in 1971 |
| 34 | Thunder Bay | Ontario | 126,861 | 1.6x | VIA service cancelled in 1990 |
| 35 | Nanaimo | British Columbia | 117,144 | 1.4x | VIA service suspended in 2011 |
| 39 | Fredericton | New Brunswick | 111,024 | 1.4x | VIA service cancelled in 1985 |
| 41 | Red Deer | Alberta | 105,767 | 1.3x | VIA service cancelled in 1985 |
| 44 | Cape Breton | Nova Scotia | 100,711 | 1.2x | VIA service cancelled in 1990 |
| 46 | Granby | Quebec | 90,459 | 1.1x | CN service cancelled in 1961 |
| 47 | Sault Ste. Marie | Ontario | 81,238 | CP service cancelled in 1977 |
Even without having ever set foot into Sault Ste. Marie, I'm highly confident that the city would be much better served with a frequent bus service to Sudbury than a once-daily slow and (due to the track conditions) uncomfortable train ride could ever achieve - and all of that at a fraction of the rail service's subsidy need...
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UrbanJon
New Member
Think harder, because you are only proving my point here. Why must Gaspe have its passenger train returned when it is less than 1/5 the size of Sault Ste Marie? What makes Gaspe so special that VIA should bend over backwards and stretch their staff, timetables and equipment thin just for a lightly used train to a town significantly smaller than other towns that don't have rail service?
And I totally agree. But at the same time, much like Sault Ste Marie, I am sure Gaspe would have much better service with busses than with a return of the Chaleur and like you mentioned, it would be at a fraction of the subsidy.
Urban Sky
Senior Member
LOL, should VIA abandon service to any station other than Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, just because all other stations serve smaller population centers than Calgary? The population size of a line's endpoint is only one of many factors which determine whether a line may justify intercity passenger rail service or not.
In any case, it's the federal government which decides which lines fall within VIA's mandate and which don't - and absent a decision to remove the Chaleur from VIA's mandate, service to Gaspé will resume as soon as soon as track conditions allow a safe return to pre-suspension service levels...
UrbanJon
New Member
I only emphasize the size of the endpoint station because it illustrates that the market it serves is very small and not worth serving with rail.
But more to the point, I strongly believe that the Chaleur should be removed from VIA's mandate. It isn't an essential service due to the fact that there are much stronger alternatives. It is therefore a significant waste of VIA's resources.
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Urban Sky
Senior Member
The worst kind of rail advocates are those which only care about restoring/improving rail services in their own region, while resenting other rail services simply because they serve the "wrong" part of the country (or in this case: the "wrong" province).
The only thing your pre-occupation with the population count of Gaspé illustrates is how completely oblivious and ignorant you are of what market the Chaleur serves (when it runs), just as you seem to be with virtually every single claim or opinion I've seen you sprouting in this forum so far...
"Reden ist Silber, Schweigen ist Gold"
(Talking is silver, remaining silent is gold)
- German pro-verb
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tmlittle
Active Member
Different people have different opinions. Personally I am on the side that we need to restore passenger service on as many lines as possible throughout Canada, because we run the risk of boxing ourselves into a corner in some cases by building up bus services. I also oppose highway expansion in general, so I'm not in favour of a model that would be highway-based, especially when in so much of rural Canada, there are still a number of barely-used rail corridors which provide unparalleled access to small downtowns. Rail service direct to rural town centres would help correct the "spreading out" many towns have suffered from in the 20th century and be a useful trigger for downtown revitalization, improvement of other modes of transport, and local business potential.
I think it's a mistake to make these comparisons because service abandonments happened for many different reasons, and I think the campaign for service restoration is in any case a unique one -- for example, the NEORN and First Nations proposals around restoring Algoma passenger rail which would emphasize regional connectivity, something a lot of North American transit fans struggle with conceptually I think, because a regional network model doesn't follow the dynamic of suburban radial lines feeding into a metropolitan core. I think a lot of transit planning fans in North America have an instinctive preference for that model because it's what is familiar to them, especially with GO and Toronto, but it's not really applicable to a lot of Canada except in limited cases like Toronto, Montreal, and maybe cities like London. This stuff needs to serve the area and take local needs into account, such as the recognition that the Northlander was poorly marketed in the context of cottage country around Bracebridge and Gravenhurst, as opposed to the way the Sudbury-White River train has been extensively marketed as an outdoor tripper/fisher/hunter train to access areas that aren't connected to the road system (implication, you can go fishing in areas that won't be mobbed by people and fished or hunted out). Similarly our population dynamics are shifting toward formerly suburban seniors selling up and becoming exurban and with the likelihood they'll be able to continue to drive dropping every year, there need to be solutions for these people. Similarly with COVID-19 we've seen the strong desire for people to get out of cities in the summer and travel to Niagara, Georgian Bay, the Bruce Peninsula, etc. along with concerns from local municipalities in these areas about being overrun with illegally parked cars. These areas could benefit from a pattern of high service levels in the summer, lower service levels in the winter, and depending on the actual place, a mix of bus and train service (or very short trains) to adjust for ridership. There is no way these trains (or buses) would be terminating at Union.
I think especially with the building up of new suburban rail hubs in the GTA, plans like RER/GO Expansion, and even plans for bespoke branchline services like Cambridge-Guelph, we're looking at a future where the hurdle for rail service is a lot lower, and if battery EMUs become widespread, the potential to reactivate rural branchlines for passenger service is strong, and have those services connect at the nearest major intercity hub where a transfer to Via would be possible. I think if anything, UT is a bit too stuck in the idea that every train needs to terminate at a major metropolitan centre, but if we are going to grow our rail system then in the future, we can start looking at how railway stations in 2nd or 3rd tier Ontario cities can become hubs of their own. Especially with the Corridor, we need to reinforce that "spine" as much as possible, but at the same time, a train to Gaspe could easily serve a similar "weekender" role, and probably did before its cancellation. What is the lesson we are teaching, say, university students in Montreal who enjoy the outdoors but don't own a car and ride the subway every day, if they need a car to travel to Gaspe? Our rail network has shrunk and lost so many branchline services over the past 40 years and the lesson can't be that we need to reduce it further around a single urbanized mega-corridor between Toronto and Montreal, or we'll just hasten the already-near terminal infliction of cars and highways on rural Canada, a highway system that kills quite a lot of people one way or another. We'll also teach younger people that they have to choose between living inexpensively and being car-free, and that cars are for people who can find work and afford to live in Toronto, not people who want to stay in their hometown, work in industries that are rural by nature. We'll teach people that travelling requires a car (we really already have, especially with Greyhound gone).
I think the issue with operating a reduced passenger rail system in a Canadian environment is the rule of thumb that fringe industries are expensive to run. You have fewer bidders on contracts for things like track maintenance, it's harder to shop around for the best price or design of cars and you're stuck with a few manufacturers (look at the disaster with Bombardier). You don't have a solid core of professionals in the passenger rail industry and end up bringing them in from other countries or other industries, and in both cases that can be expensive and a bad fit. It's harder to find trades workers experienced in the industry. You have very few opportunities for economies of scale. For example, if Canada was producing passenger rail cars near-continuously and there were a number of competing manufacturers, I imagine things would be a lot more cost effective, and plants like Thunder Bay wouldn't be going through endless cyclical layoffs that decimate their ability to fulfill large contracts (e.g. TTC) on time when they do come around. We need to scale up our passenger rail industry to meet our population growth and try to bring more people onto transit, and trying the old tactic of substituting buses for rail service, seen pretty much everywhere as an inferior option and a sign of degrading service, is not the way.
crs1026
Superstar
^So long as rail passsenger runs at a loss, there will be a decision required about whether to offer a subsidy. This pushes the decision into a political forum and political decisions do not correlate precisely with ROI (or even some more abstract metric of overall benefit). It would be nice if there were formal criteria but no one should assume that a political process will slavishly apply these. There will be winners and losers.
I see a big difference in how the business case will evolve for lines radiating from a major urban hub that lies in the country's most densely populated area, irrespective of the population size of the end point.. Northern Ontario is a good example of that... when you have the prospect of attracting x riders a day to/from Niagara, plus y riders a day to/from Windsor, Kitchener, Belleville, etc it gives you the prospect of filling an entire train a day, even if the northern end point (let's take Kap as an example) may be small and the train is empty when it gets there.
Tourism creates ridership in a different manner than A to B transport . But even there, VIA might be better served to negotiate with tour operators that use the Ocean to get people to Matapedia, and then load them on a bus so they can have a structured, planned, far reaching tour of the region. The town of Gaspe isn't that big or full of attractions that one can build a major market hauling people there, unless they have the mobility to explore the broader area, and stop along the way. I have no insight into whether a one-seat ride to Gaspe by train would generate more tour business than a package tour operation from Matapedia, but the decision will be based on market and cost. Connecting Gaspe (or any other destination) just to have the line on a map is bad decisionmaking.
At the end of the day, a line with one train a day will seldom generate enough revenue to create appetite for investment, public or private. Realistically, most rail passenger in this country will be in corridors where there are enough riders to fill multiple trains a day. Population along the route will clearly correlate to this, but other factors (quality of existing roads, options for air, etc etc) will play also.
I would like to see far more transparency in these studies so we understand all this and debate from fact, but commercial interests may argue for VIA not showing its cards. The best we can do is use informed speculation, a questionning attitude, and sometimes a degree of skepticism. What matters most is for VIA to be able to broach and pursue ideas in an entrepreneurial way when they see an opportunity, without political blowback or bureaucratic obstruction. Their take may or not agree with our individual desires, it may be a "say it ain't so" proposition for any specific route opportunity.
- Paul
I see a big difference in how the business case will evolve for lines radiating from a major urban hub that lies in the country's most densely populated area, irrespective of the population size of the end point.. Northern Ontario is a good example of that... when you have the prospect of attracting x riders a day to/from Niagara, plus y riders a day to/from Windsor, Kitchener, Belleville, etc it gives you the prospect of filling an entire train a day, even if the northern end point (let's take Kap as an example) may be small and the train is empty when it gets there.
Tourism creates ridership in a different manner than A to B transport . But even there, VIA might be better served to negotiate with tour operators that use the Ocean to get people to Matapedia, and then load them on a bus so they can have a structured, planned, far reaching tour of the region. The town of Gaspe isn't that big or full of attractions that one can build a major market hauling people there, unless they have the mobility to explore the broader area, and stop along the way. I have no insight into whether a one-seat ride to Gaspe by train would generate more tour business than a package tour operation from Matapedia, but the decision will be based on market and cost. Connecting Gaspe (or any other destination) just to have the line on a map is bad decisionmaking.
At the end of the day, a line with one train a day will seldom generate enough revenue to create appetite for investment, public or private. Realistically, most rail passenger in this country will be in corridors where there are enough riders to fill multiple trains a day. Population along the route will clearly correlate to this, but other factors (quality of existing roads, options for air, etc etc) will play also.
I would like to see far more transparency in these studies so we understand all this and debate from fact, but commercial interests may argue for VIA not showing its cards. The best we can do is use informed speculation, a questionning attitude, and sometimes a degree of skepticism. What matters most is for VIA to be able to broach and pursue ideas in an entrepreneurial way when they see an opportunity, without political blowback or bureaucratic obstruction. Their take may or not agree with our individual desires, it may be a "say it ain't so" proposition for any specific route opportunity.
- Paul