This is not a surveillance post. Or an Open Access Post. Or even a Science Fiction post. But regular readers will know that I am also very concerned with the climate crisis and, in common with most people in Canada who don’t drive or prefer to use public transport, I am very frustrated with Via Rail, the Canadian passenger rail company and transit in general. This is an edited version of a very long Twitter thread I posted about this which was roundly ignored! Now you too can ignore this version in blog form…
This morning I got up at 5am to walk to the O-Train in Ottawa (itself a whole sad story of mismanagement and corruption) to get to the Via Rail station to take a train to Montreal in time for a workshop that started at 9am. I should be absolutely clear here: we are not talking about a trip between obscure small towns, we are talking about a trip from the national capital of a major world nation to one of its biggest cities, a genuine “global city.”
The Via Rail component was 178km and it took 2 hours 15 mins. It should have been 2 hours 4 minutes, but of course the train was late, but actually not by that much by Via Rail’s usual standards. But assuming that it could have been on time, the journey would have had a an average speed of just 86km/h.
This, by the way, was not some clunky old engine, it was an entirely new train, part of Via Rail’s self-proclaimed “state-of-the-art” fleet. These trains have a top operating speed of 201km/h. This is not High Speed Rail, which is generally around 300km/h or more and often requires special, welded-smooth rails. But it was still a reasonably fast train that indeed, at its best during the journey, reached nearly 155km/h, as the helpful speedometer on the electronic information screens showed us. This means that in theory, Via Rail could, without any new track, have a service from Ottawa to Montreal that takes less than an hour. But to remind you, it actually took 2hrs 15 minutes.
As a comparison here, I won’t do the “unfair” thing of comparing Canada to more advanced nations like China or Japan or France or Italy or Morocco, all of which have high speed rail. Instead I’ll compare Canadian rail today with what was going on almost 100 years ago, because surely, we can all agree, technology has improved vastly since then. But back in the 1930s, mainline steam trains could operate generally, on average over a complete journey, at about 100km/h and in fact reached up to about 130km/h at their fastest in the UK. In other words, 100 years ago, mainline railways with steam locomotives were substantially faster over their whole journey than today’s newest Canadian trains.
Just to add insult to injury, let’s consider Canada’s international rail links, or lack of them. There is for example no rail link at all between Windsor and Detroit which is ridiculous as they are literally across the river from each other and both have railway stations. Currently getting from Windsor to Detroit stations is rather reminiscent of what is must have been like crossing the border from West to East Berlin during the Cold War. Then when there are actual rail links they are a complete joke: witness the once-a-day Amtrak journey between Montreal and New York City, which covers its 600km in just over 11 hours, for an average journey speed of 55km/h, which makes my Ottawa-Montreal journey look super-fast and, talking of the Cold War, you could beat in a Trabant, the notorious East German “people’s car”. Seriously, are the railway gods just trolling us at this point?
So what is wrong with Via Rail? What is wrong with Canada? This investigative series by Halifax Examiner covers most of it in detail, but here is my take on the issues *and* what we do about them.
Part of it is that Via Rail is neither a proper state-run railway system, nor is it a private company. It’s a Crown Corporation, a subsidized entity that has to make its own money while fulfilling certain duties. It seems to be caught between two stools, not receiving enough investment but somehow always expected to do more with less, and make money while providing a public service. Second, the tracks are mostly single lines in any direction with very few sidings and there is really not much more than one actual main route across Canada, with a few spurs (including that to Ottawa). Third, Via Rail does not own the tracks. The rail freight operators own the tracks: mainly Canadian National (CN), which owns over half, and Canadian Pacific (CP), which owns just under a third, plus a number of smaller operators. They have no legal obligation to abide by Via Rail’s timetable, coordinate their timetables, or even make room for Via trains. And the freight trains are also so long (often kilometres long) that they generally can’t use the few sidings there are. Instead, if there is a situation where a freight train and a Via Rail train are on the same line, the Via train has to wait on a siding until the freight train passes, and then trundle slowly along behind it. I actually remember a particular example when I first moved to Canada when we were told that a freight train had stopped in front of us because the driver had to take a statutory break, and there we sat for an hour while he took it! I haven’t experienced this exact thing ever again, but it gives you a sense of who holds the power in any conflict between freight companies and passenger rail in Canada.
So passenger rail in Canada is a slow and unreliable mode of transport, and for those who have a choice, they are increasingly deciding to use cars, coach services, or, over longer distances, flying. It’s exactly the opposite of what is needed in an age of climate crisis. Both Via Rail and the freight companies say they would prefer it if there were separate lines and in Ontario at least this might happen in the next couple of decades as a plan for “High Frequency Rail” (note: *not* High Speed Rail) is implemented. But the reduction in passenger demand has become a self-fulfilling circular logic for the federal government, as witnessed in this parliamentary research report from 2015, tl;dr version: “why should we subsidize Via Rail when people don’t want to use it?” Of course, as that report notes, back when more people did use the railways in the early 80s, the federal government cut subsidies and started to say that Via Rail should do more with less, which is one of the reasons we are in this situation in the first place!
Well, what should be done? Lots of things have suggested from the usual neoliberal panacea of privatization and the discipline of the market to full nationalization. But these are my suggestions:
1. Clearly the fundamental priority is investment. Not “subsidy”, *investment*. The federal government should be seeing both rail freight and passenger rail as key strategic investment priorities in an era of climate crisis. Canada should be trying hard to get people to swap from road and air to rail, and government must realize that it has to pay more for this happen.
2. In the immediate term, to be a more attractive and realistic option for regular travel, Via Rail needs to be able to run the trains it already has nearer the speeds they are already technically capable of reaching. To do this, here needs to be legally-mandated coordinated timetabling between rail freight and passenger rail, with passenger rail a priority. In theory at least, such a priority exists even in a rail-unfriendly nation like the USA, although it often goes unenforced.
3. As soon as possible, Via Rail also needs to abandon the weird notion that it seems to have that rail travel is like air travel, with silly baggage size and quantity restrictions, making it very difficult to take bicycles (well, in fact it is often easier to take a bike on a plane than it is on many Via Rail trains…), strange and unnecessary formalities like line-ups / queues in stations and multiple redundant ticket checks. In short, Canada needs to look at how countries with good and well-used railway systems work, particularly Japan and China. Above all it should also go back to clear, understandable and reasonable ticket prices, reintroduce commuter tickets, and get rid of their recently introduced airline-style pricing levels, which have just added insult to injury for long-suffering passengers.
4. In the short term, Via Rail needs more money for maintenance of existing rail lines, upgrading signaling and line safety infrastructure, replacing old rolling stock, and extending siding length to enable longer, slower freight trains to get out of the way of faster, shorter passenger trains. In the medium term, the rail line infrastructure should be doubled on all lines currently shared by rail freight and Via Rail #passenger trains, so that each has their own lines.
5. Also in the medium term, closed rail lines that used to serve remote and northern communities, especially Indigenous communities, for example, the services on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, whose future is bound up with Indigenous land claims; and the Ontario Northlander, a line which served many Indigenous and non-Indigenous northern Ontario communities and which should be reopened, preferably with significant investment.
6. Ideally, this should be part of a step to greater state control of passenger rail as both critical infrastructure and a tool for the re-envisioning of “Canada.” New lines could actually be built, in conjunction with Indigenous nations and currently under-served communities. Rail might have been a symbol and tool of settler-colonial development, but new rail could actually be something whose control, ownership and benefits are planned and shared between Indigenous nations, provincial and territorial governments and the federal state.
7. Canada’s government and Via Rail should also coordinate with the government of the USA and Amtrak to create serious cross-border rail links, not just the quaint, slow tourist-oriented routes, particularly Toronto and Montreal to New York City, Vancouver to Seattle (and beyond), and Toronto / Windsor to Detroit / Chicago.
8. In the longer term, we should plan for and invest in proper high speed rail for the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal-(Ottawa)-Quebec corridor, and for Canada-USA / Via Rail-Amtrak links. Yes, I mean it. Yes, seriously. International high speed rail could replace many environmentally damaging flights and car trips.
I realize that may not live to see much of this actually take place. And in the immediate meantime, I have a 2-hour return Via Rail journey that should really take half that time, to look forward to…
ubisurv 