Category: Ocean

Blueprint unveiled for passenger rail in Canada

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Cover page of the VIA 1-4-10 plan, prepared by Greg Gormick for Transport Action Canada, showing a VIA Rail train waiting at a set of signal lights in the dark.

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been urged to undertake a sweeping review of passenger rail from coast to coast, and to initiate action to bring this country in step with the other nations in the G7 community.  The challenge was unveiled two days after the new Liberal administration took office, at an event commemorating National Railway Day.  It coincides with the 130th anniversary of the last spike ceremony that marked completion of a continuous rail link from across the country on November 7, 1885.

Transport Action Canada and its regional affiliates have just completed a comprehensive document entitled The VIA 1-4-10 Plan.  Prepared by eminent transportation consultant and writer Greg Gormick, it explores the past, present and future of passenger rail, tracing its decline since the flawed creation of VIA Rail Canada by order-in-council in 1978, and offering practical and achievable suggestions for its reconstruction.  A copy of the report has been delivered to Transport Minister Marc Garneau, with public release taking place during a Railway Day event at the VIA station in St. Mary’s, Ontario.

“The timing is doubly appropriate,” says Transport Action Atlantic president Ted Bartlett, “because a government that has embraced ‘real change’ is taking office so close to the anniversary of an event so significant to Canada’s very existence.  We’re asking Minister Garneau to include this issue among his priorities.”

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Extra Trains for the Holidays

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A young girl looking out the window of a train, passing by a coastal scene with snow in the air. Text reads The Ocean.
A Christmas present from VIA! Extra trains will once again run between Halifax and Montreal for the holiday season.

Good news for holiday travellers in Atlantic Canada: VIA Rail has announced that they will once again be running extra departures of The Ocean over the upcoming holiday season. Although a trial-run last year did not bring in as many passengers as VIA had hoped, the railway continues to believe that there is potential for extra ridership over the busy weeks around Christmas, as many people travel to spend time with their families.

As they did last year, VIA has added three extra round-trips into the schedule over a roughly two-week period, meaning there will be a total of 24 departures (12 in each direction) from Dec. 16th and Jan. 3rd, an increase of 6 total departures. It seems VIA is working to learn from the mistakes they made last year. This year’s trains have been added to the schedule earlier, and there is already promotion of the extra trains on the VIA website. How extensively they will advertise these trains remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: if we want to encourage VIA to continue running extra trains during the holidays and consider adding additional frequencies at other times of the year, these trains will need to be well used!

The Ocean normally runs between Halifax and Montreal on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday in each direction. Because Christmas Day falls on a Friday, there will be no train that day in either direction. Instead, that trip will be rescheduled to a non-normal day of the week, meaning there will effectively be 4 unusual departures in each direction, even though only 3 of those are truly “extra” trains.

Here is the schedule of additional departures:

VIA 14 (Montreal-Halifax)

Monday Dec. 21
Tuesday Dec. 22
Monday Dec. 28**
Tuesday Dec. 29

VIA 15 (Halifax-Montreal)

Tuesday Dec. 22
Monday Dec. 28**
Tuesday Dec. 29
Saturday Jan. 2

**The starred trains are re-scheduled trains from Christmas Day.

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VIA tightens Ocean Schedule

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There has been a slight improvement in the Ocean schedule, with the issue of a new timetable shortening the overall time between Montreal and Halifax by one hour.  Effective February 18, train 15 departs from Halifax at noon instead of 1100, and arrival of #14 will be an hour earlier at 1735.  Arrival and departure times at Montreal remain unchanged.

The schedule tightening is partially due to track improvements completed in 2014, but the dwell time built into the schedule to accommodate switching at Matapédia for the now-dormant Gaspé service has also been eliminated.  One permanent slow order that hasn’t changed is on the Bathurst to Miramichi segment, which still requires an hour and 41 minutes.  Sixty years ago the steam-powered Ocean Limited covered the 44 miles in well under an hour.

Last fall, Steve Del Bosco, chief advisor to VIA’s CEO, told Transport Action Atlantic that discussions were ongoing with CN regarding track speed.  (Mr. Del Bosco retired at the end of January after 36 years of service, having been with the company since its earliest days.)  Unconfirmed reports suggest that the new timetable is but an interim step, and that further improvements may be pending.

Fifty years ago the Ocean ran between Moncton and Campbellton in four hours flat, a time that changed little over the next four decades.  But the effects of deferred maintenance eventually came into play, as more and more slow orders were imposed, adding over two hours to the scheduled time by 2014.  The new schedule, while an improvement, still requires more than 5½ hours for the Moncton-Campbellton run.

The schedule change also restores some lost bus connections at Moncton and Truro for passengers to and from PEI, Cape Breton and the Newfoundland ferry.  While all are now theoretically possible assuming on-time arrivals, the situation at Truro is complicated by the unfortunate fact that Maritime Bus no longer calls at the VIA station there.