(The Canadian Press circulated the following on June 29.)
OTTAWA — Almost half of Via Rail’s passenger trains arrived late over the winter — and many were very tardy, says a new report.
The slumping performance, in a year when the Crown corporation promised to get more trains to the station on time, is being blamed on severe weather that crippled Via Rail’s aging locomotives and damaged tracks, switches and signals.
For the first three months this year, 46 per cent of trains arrived late, says an internal report obtained under the Access to Information Act. The company had been shooting for just 14 per cent in the first quarter.
The late-arrival figure would be even worse had Via Rail not given itself a “grace period” that allows it to deem any short-haul train that’s up to 15 minutes late as on time. Long-haul trains get a 30-minute grace period.
The March numbers were particularly bad, with 54 per cent of trains across the country delivering passengers later than scheduled. One of the worst-performing routes is also one of the most popular — Toronto-Ottawa, where almost three-quarters of the trains arrived late in March.
The company provides so-called “late train credits” to travellers whose trains are significantly overdue, which can be used only to purchase future Via Rail tickets. If a short-haul train in central Canada is more than one hour late, for example, the credit is 50 per cent off the next ticket.
The poor performance comes at a bad time for Via Rail, which needed $200 million last year from the federal government — about $50 for each ticket sold — to cover a shortfall in revenue.
The strong dollar has sent Canadian tourists abroad and is keeping foreign tourists — especially Americans — at home, cutting into rail revenues. And fierce airline competition in central Canada has kept seat prices in check, despite fuel surcharges, eroding Via Rail’s potential customer base in the more lucrative “corridor” services of Ontario and Quebec.
Most passenger trains travel on CN tracks, which are crowded with freight trains that often cause delays. Severe winter weather also froze many CN switches and caused signal malfunctions.
But Via Rail’s own aging F-40 locomotives have themselves suffered numerous breakdowns, especially in cold weather. Ottawa has promised $232 million over five years to rebuild 53 engines, but the first won’t be ready until March 2009.
Via Rail recently gave itself some wiggle room: a new June 1 schedule for the Quebec City to Windsor, Ont., corridor has built in significant extra time to account for summer construction and other problems. And the Vancouver-Toronto service is being given extra time to arrive in a new schedule taking effect Dec. 2.
Spokesman Malcolm Andrews said the company is also “in the process of evaluating suppliers for work on Via-owned tracks . . . and is in discussions with the operating railways regarding improvements to their infrastructure.”
But “any significant track improvement work will inevitably mean speed reductions and, temporarily, longer trip times until the work is completed.”
A transportation analyst said Via Rail is doing the right thing by refurbishing its aging locomotives, but late-arrival problems will remain as long as it must share tracks with CN.
“CN is looking at its bottom line, and it doesn’t have strong incentives to help Via to perform well,” said David Jeanes of Transport 2000, a non-profit federation of consumer groups.
“And so in a crunch, Via doesn’t get the track capacity that it needs.”