TORONTO — When picking up someone at Via Rail, it’s always wise to take a stack of newspapers, according to an editorial in the Globe and Mail. You’ll often have plenty of time to read them between the moment when the train is supposed to arrive and when it actually does.
So it was last week. With unwelcome time on my hands at Ottawa station, my eyes skimmed over a National Post story that Via had informed the federal government that for a mere $3-billion extra it could improve service in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. Two days earlier, the Toronto-Ottawa train carrying a relative had arrived 25 minutes late. The next day, according to a friend who went to the station, the train was almost an hour behind schedule. This day, the Toronto-Ottawa train with another relative aboard arrived 45 minutes late. War and Peace would have been a better bet than the newspapers.
There being no Via employee to ask the reason for this latest delay, I wandered into the empty first-class lounge. There, a bored-looking chap responded to an inquiry with the assertion that “95 per cent of our trains are on time.”
This assertion is, of course, company propaganda, since regular travellers know that Via time is not real time. Asked again for the reason for the delay, he tapped a computer and replied: “The train was diverted onto the south track,” as if everyone in Canada should know the whereabouts or importance of the “south track.”
Signal malfunction. Moving aside for freight trains. Switching problems. Diversion onto the “south track.” Via is inventive, if nothing else, in explaining late arrivals. On a track with few curves, in excellent weather, Via trains can’t guarantee on-time arrivals. Those lucky enough to have travelled on continental European trains can only weep.
This tardiness, of course, is not supposed to happen. Punctuality is one of rail’s ace cards. Tired of delayed planes? Take the train. So say the advertisements. Every so often, Via comes up with a new plan, or reaches into the government’s pockets for more money, promising that things are going to improve.
Via has always been in the absurd situation whereby it does not control the rail over which its trains pass. Freight invariably has priority. What regular Via passenger has not seen his or her train shunted onto a siding while a freight train rumbles past? A new arrangement was supposed to help Via get better priority on those shared lines.
And don’t forget those brightly painted new locomotives for which the federal government handed Via a huge capital subsidy of $400-million, on top of the $170-million annual operating subsidy. These mighty machines, we were told, would pull trains faster and help them run on time. Banished as a dreadful memory were the old locomotives that ran too slowly, broke down periodically and could not deliver service of the kind that allows you to read a pile of newspapers while waiting.
Speaking of locomotives and subsidies, could anyone please explain why rail is subsidized and air and road travel are not?
The only justification — and it was a thin one — used to be that trains polluted less than planes, buses and cars. Maybe they do, but the number of passengers travelling, say, from Montreal to Toronto on the train is a fraction of those going by other modes. So the environmental saving is minimal. Beware, therefore, when Via wraps its next demand for subsidy in the cloth of climate change.
At the very moment when air travellers face cascading taxes, departure fees, air traffic charges and fuel surtaxes — so that a $200 sticker price becomes a $330 fare (a tax rate previously reserved only for alcohol and tobacco — Via is looking for a new set of subsidies (oops, investments).
Air travellers in almost 30 Canadian cities are paying for “improvements” to airports. But whereas private citizens are paying for these investments, Via is always looking for the public purse to help finance new projects.
Rail doesn’t pay for itself anywhere, reply Via’s defenders. Just look at Amtrak.
The U.S. train service lost $1.2-billion last year, nearly double its 2000 loss. That “loss” is not far from Via’s per capita annual subsidy in currency adjusted terms. U.S. legislators have run out of patience with Amtrak, but the Canadian government just keeps coming back for more.
Amtrak recently hired a retired Canadian, David Gunn, to try a corporate turnaround, starting with making the trains run on time and losing less money while doing so. He should have been hired by Via.