MONTREAL — VIA Rail Canada’s new president and CEO reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the “high-frequency rail” plan championed by her predecessor, but no decision has been made on the plan to create a separate passenger-only right-of-way for parts of the Quebec-Windsor, Ont., corridor.
CEO Cynthia Garneau — on the job for only a few weeks since succeeding Yves Desjardins-Siciliano — and Board of Directors Chairman François Bertrand offered those views Tuesday during VIA’s annual public meeting.
“We’ve created a committee to supervise this project that we hope will enter it into a new phase very soon or before the end of 2019,” Bertrand said during the meeting, available here as a 52-minute webcast. The alternative to building the separate right-of-way is adding more trains on the existing Canadian National route.
“This project is complex and ambitious,” Garneau said, “and we continue to work with Transport Canada to capture its scope, to mitigate the risks.” Later, she added, “The feedback we’ve been getting is encouraging. It will be using existing infrastructure, as you know, and existing rights-of-way all the way from Quebec City to Toronto.” Still ahead are environmental analyses and “discussions with communities to look at all of the social acceptability issues.”
Bertrand and Garneau noted that revenue was up 7.4% and ridership 8% in 2018, building on an unbroken string of gains since 2014. There was continued emphasis on the corridor, which provides 95% of VIA’s ridership and which will receive new single-level cars and locomotives from Siemens. [See “VIA Rail Canada, Siemens announce deal for new corridor equipment,” Trains News Wire, Dec. 13, 2018.]
The “Top 10 questions for VIA management” session answered by VIA department heads did yield some previously undisclosed information:
— VIA “fully intends” to resume triweekly Canadian operation over its entire Toronto-Vancouver route next spring after CN capacity improvements are completed. This year, one of the round trips only operates Edmonton-Vancouver [See “VIA settles on dome deployment plan for the Canadian,” Trains News Wire, May 2, 2019].
— Though the Quebec government is working to rebuild tracks on the Gaspe peninsula, VIA intends to go all the way to the end of the line again, “as long as the tracks are safe.” No date has been set for a return to service.
— There are no plans to fill the void left by Greyhound’s departure from Western Canada, since the company does not “have the resources allocated to entertain any more services.”
— Providing additional trains in Southwest Ontario “is solely dependent on working with the infrastructure providers and intermodal partners to evaluate access” but “we don’t see the ability to add services in the short term to a region that we believe shows great potential.”
