(The following column by Justin Bur appeared on the Toronto Star website on July 2. Mr. Bur is vice-president of Transport 2000 Canada.)
TORONTO — Going by the way we run our trains, you’d think Canadians didn’t have watches or clocks. It’s a stunning decline for the country that invented standard time zones for the purpose of synchronizing railway schedules.
VIA Rail Canada’s 2007 annual report reveals the worst on-time performance rate in the 30-year history of the corporation. In the crucial Quebec-Windsor corridor, including the heavily travelled Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle, almost a quarter (22 per cent) of trains were seriously late in 2007. In Western Canada, where the transcontinental train ride is an important international tourist attraction, 76 per cent of the trains ran late. The mind boggles.
VIA’s response to the situation is to pad the schedule. This year the transcontinental train will take a full extra night to reach Vancouver, bringing travel time back to 1940s standards. VIA has just increased Toronto-Montreal travel times by about 45 minutes effective June 1, erasing 30 years’ worth of service improvements. We are told the lengthened schedules are necessary for summer track work programs but track work alone shouldn’t impose such a huge degradation in travel time.
Unfortunately, VIA Rail can’t do anything else about the problem. VIA is no ordinary corporation with the power to allocate resources to solve problems and invest in the future. Instead, VIA was created by accident or by design to be utterly dependent on the federal government for funding and on the owners of the rail lines it runs over, mostly CN, for scheduling.
On a well-run railway, shouldn’t a derailment be an exceptional event? CN derailed a train every month for the first seven months of 2007, in some cases in urban areas, in most cases blocking a busy main line and disrupting VIA passengers.
Shouldn’t a well-run railway be able to run trains on schedule and rarely suffer mechanical breakdowns? CN, we have seen, allows VIA to run on schedule only three-quarters of the time, while breakdowns of barely roadworthy freight equipment along the track are an important contributing factor.
In the face of such difficulties, it might seem reasonable to abandon the passenger service and let the freight railways resolve their own difficulties. But this has never been an option, less so now than ever.
A railway has two inherent advantages over other forms of transport: it runs with very low friction, steel wheel on steel rail; and it runs on a fixed guideway. From these advantages stem the railway’s efficiencies in fuel consumption, environmental impact, (theoretical) safety and reliability, manpower and passenger comfort.
Well-managed railways adapt to peak travel demand more readily and tolerate inclement weather more gracefully than any other mode. In a time of high fuel costs and congested roadways and airports, no industrial society can forego such advantages. It is no surprise that VIA Rail’s ridership and CN’s freight volume continue to grow, despite timekeeping woes.
The railway problem is not just one of corporate arrogance. Governments have for more than 50 years been willing and anxious to invest public money to build better roads and bigger airports, but rarely to build more efficient railways.
If we wish to continue to travel in comfort, even as highway and airport expansion have become prohibitively costly in terms of money and environmental impact, governments will have to reopen the door to public contributions toward improving the rail infrastructure. In fact, the process has already started with a three-way (federal-provincial-industry) program to rebuild short line railways in Quebec’s regions and federal grants to independent lines elsewhere in the country.
VIA Rail received a vital infusion of $692 million from the federal government last October. To protect this investment and to ensure that VIA’s service remains viable, there may be little option other than to use federal regulatory power to require reasonable scheduling of VIA trains by CN.
Then the serious negotiations must begin on a long-term partnership to build once again a world-class railway system in Canada.