(The following story by Reid Southwick appeared on the Daily Gleaner website on July 1.)
SAINT JOHN — Industrial Rail Services Inc. filed a more than $100-million bid with Ottawa Monday to refurbish the entire Via Rail fleet that runs between Montreal and Toronto, says company president Dick Carpenter.
The Moncton-based firm would hire 125 more workers to restore 98 passenger rail cars over a four-year period, beginning in 2009.
“This will put us on the map for big production,” said Carpenter, who heads a company that repairs locomotives for General Motors and Arcelor Mittal, the world’s largest steel producer.
“The more expensive oil gets, the more rail is proving to be an efficient way to move people and goods. Hopefully, when this four-year contract is over, and we’re geared up to do large passenger rail sets, we will be the people to get it done.”
The Via Rail bid is part of a $691.9-million federal investment to revitalize inter-city passenger rail services in Canada.
Billed as the largest capital program in Via’s history, the project will focus on eliminating bottlenecks in the Quebec City/Windsor corridor, station refurbishments and fleet renewal of F40 locomotives and light, rapid and comfortable (LRC) passenger cars.
In its bid for the Montreal/Toronto passenger fleet, Industrial Rail outlines its plans to gut each car and refurbish everything from seats to air conditioning systems, from washrooms to under-carriages, said Carpenter.
Work would begin later this year, when company engineers would start building a prototype to Via’s specifications.
Full production would begin in early 2009, with plans to complete about two cars every month for the following four years.
“Demand for rail service is ever-increasing, and they (Via) can’t afford to take more than a couple cars out of service at a time, so we will have to turn them around quite quickly,” said Carpenter.
The project would consume about half of Industrial Rail’s 13,200 square metre facility, formerly CN Railway’s locomotive repair and rebuild shop in Moncton’s west end. The remainder of the building would continue to carry out the company’s core business.
Industrial Rail is a full-service locomotive and passenger railcar refurbishment firm established about 10 years ago, after CN closed its Moncton doors in the late 1980s.
Carpenter, also head of commercial real estate firm Heritage Developments, said he moved into the rail business when Heritage began posting large profits.
“Our real estate business had become mature and I made a conscious decision to use the profits from that business and try to make other things happen,” said Carpenter.
“We could have kept expanding across Canada or find something else here to put local people to work in the local economy. I opted for the latter option.”
Industrial Rail now boasts global manufacturers on its roster of clients. Electro-Motive Diesels, Inc., based in Chicago, Ill., regularly hires the company to conduct quality assurance tests on railcars before shipping them to customers across the globe.
The Hub City firm has also transformed old railcars that travelled between Whistler and Vancouver into open-sky dome cars, allowing passengers to view the mountains, in anticipation of the 2010 Olympic Games. The company is now rebuilding small locomotives for Arcelor Mittal’s steel mining operations in Chicago.