(The following editorial appeared on the Globe and Mail website on August 5.)
TORONTO — The freight train derailment that shut down Via Rail’s Toronto-Montreal route and put thousands of passengers on to buses last week was an excellent example of the sorry state of passenger rail travel in Canada.
In 2007 almost a quarter of Via’s trains in the densely populated Windsor-Quebec City corridor arrived late. This year, Via is operating with a padded timetable that should allow it to at least claim more on-time runs, even if they are longer than before.
Via’s problems are mostly not of its own making. It is hamstrung by bottlenecks on key tracks, antiquated switching and signaling technology and, most of all, by a troubled relationship with CN, the freight carrier that owns almost all of its lines, and whose trains periodically derail across them. Freight traffic often has priority over Via trains, putting passengers at the mercy of CN’s schedule.
And successive governments have grumbled about subsidizing Via beyond the bare minimum, while supporting other enterprises that make no profit, such as the national highway system, without complaint.
Canadians are rightly jealous of the spectacular high-speed railways that have spread across Europe and Asia. That jealousy has prompted some politicians to focus on pie-in-the-sky panaceas for an inadequate rail system, such as the Quebec-Ontario study on high-speed rail announced earlier this year.
While high-speed lines in Central Canada, and between Calgary and Edmonton, would be a huge boon to the national economy, the country cannot afford to wait for decades to pass, and tens of billions of dollars to be appropriated. Modest, unglamorous upgrades to trains and tracks – beyond those included in a very minor improvement program announced by Ottawa last year – would go a long way toward improving Via’s speed and reliability in the interim.
But what Via really needs is the cash to negotiate a new deal with CN, so that passengers can have a reasonable expectation of getting where they are going in a reasonable amount of time.