(Canwest News Service circulated the following story by Mike DeSouza on May 15, 2010.)
OTTAWA — Faster trains, more frequency and punctuality are among the priorities of the new boss at Canada’s national passenger rail service.
After a difficult year in 2009, with declining revenues because of the global economic slowdown, Via Rail’s newly minted president says he expects to see ridership levels grow as new investments make train trips more attractive than travelling by road or air.
Via’s focus has been on the Central Canada routes between Quebec City and Windsor, Ont., which make up nearly 80 per cent of the Crown corporation’s business. But it is also introducing some upgrades to its cross-country trains that through the Rockies to Vancouver.
“The trend is more positive this year,” said Via Rail president and CEO Marc Laliberte in an interview with Canwest News Service. “We see an increase in ridership and again we’re getting out of this recession.”
While the federal government is continuing to participate in a study with Ontario and Quebec on the feasibility of high-speed rail between Quebec City and Windsor, Laliberte noted that it will be up to the governments to make a final decision.
“If they decide to go, we’ll be there to help and assist, but meanwhile, we still need a conventional service,” he said.
“Right now my focus is really to improve on that service, get better efficiency and better operations on what we have already and so to increase the ridership.”
In its annual report, released earlier this month, Via reported that its overall revenues, not including government funding, dropped to $264.9 million in 2009 after several years of revenues of at least $285 million.
It was also a significant drop from the record-breaking year of 2008, when the company’s revenues reached $299.2 million.
But the report noted that the service maintained its market share, with all modes of transportation seeing the effects of the slowdown in 2009.
Laliberte said some new schedule changes in 2010 are already offering better travel times between Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa, with further improvements expected within two years after the completion of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure work on the tracks between Montreal and Ottawa.
By 2012, he said, the train trip from Montreal to Toronto should be reduced to under four hours, while the trip from Ottawa to Toronto should take about 3 1/2 hours on Via Rail.
He said it makes the trip much more attractive and faster than driving.
“We have the advantage of travelling between a city centre to a city centre, downtown to downtown,” he said.
“So what we’re trying to look at is how we can increase the number of trains in that triangle (Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto) particularly, and that’s why, basically, we’re investing so much money.”
A short disruption last summer caused by a labour dispute with locomotive engineers actually helped the corporation generate $14 million in revenues over a six-day sale that offered passengers a 60 per cent discount, and attracted 369,000 customers, including 37 per cent who said they had rarely or never travelled with Via before, the report said.
Across the country, Via Rail has also used a portion of hundreds of millions of dollars in economic-stimulus funding from the government to revamp its stations, locomotives and passenger cars, while Western Canada will also benefit from a new dome panorama passenger car for scenic viewing this summer on the cross-country trip.
Laliberte said Via Rail was also hoping to boost its marketing efforts abroad in markets such as Australia and South America to promote the trip to or from Western Canada as an “exotic” attraction in the Canadian winter.
“It’s a very popular train,” he said: “It’s the fifth most popular train in the world.”
Via Rail has frequently faced criticism for unexpected delays on its busiest routes, sometimes due to scheduling conflicts with freight trains that use the same tracks. But it acknowledged in its report that it was able to improve performance on some of those routes by adding time to its schedules.
The Crown corporation is also offering free wireless Internet service for the next few months because of recent problems in its network, but is planning to offer a new and improved network to improve performance and reliability for net-surfers by this fall.