[Urban_Sky]

I can’t believe that it took me until now to find this thread, but I see that I’ve been already rather present in this conversation, without even knowing about it:

Originally Posted by Aylmer

I think that it's worth pointing out that the Canadian isn't really that much of a money loser. It's about on-par with the corridor routes on a cost recovery basis, and beats the system average by a healthy margin. Urban Sky compiled the numbers from 2017 (and I think 2018, but I can't find them anymore.

You can find the 2018 numbers here:


PS: I never developed the habit to save my tables locally and usually just search my posts on Urban Toronto. In this case it was the 12th hit when searching the keywords "Annual Report 2018" (without quotation marks) and "Urban Sky" as author...

Originally Posted by milomilo

Yeah, I've learned a lot form Urban Sky, and I hope what I post is accurate. For $41M/year, I don't see any need to get rid of it, and it very well might bring in more money from overseas.

Glad to hear you find my contributions helpful and I can assure you I'm also learning from the ideas and concerns people post here! I fully agree about the Canadian and that its subsidy ($48 million in 2018) was well invested taxpayer money, but more about that in a separate post...

Originally Posted by Dengler Avenue

Urban Sky on UrbanToronto: “ I believe Greg Gormick has a point when he keeps quoting a former CP CEO lamenting that the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway turned the launch of "The Canadian" in April 1955 (and its luxurious stainless steel fleet which serves VIA's name-sake reliably until this day) into the most costly mistake in its corporate history and prompted CP to pursue its total exit out of the passenger business. Nevertheless, if the Trans-Canada Highway continues to pose a barrier to make passenger rail viable (again), then this is a fact we need to accept sooner or later...”
https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/thread...21060/page-418 #6264

Thank you for reminding me that I'm not just criticizing Greg Gormick, like I recently did on Urban Toronto. By the way, he has a forthcoming book of which an excerpt deals with the last run of the Canadian on its old (CPR) route, but it doesn't mention this quote:
http://railpast.com/CRN/On%20Track/Canadian%20Adieu.pdf

Originally Posted by milomilo

Go to Urban Toronto and ask Urban Sky this question, he'll let you know exactly why the Canadian runs the way it does.

I don't want to do a disservice by posting things that aren't accurate, but AFAIK the Canadian runs the way it does because VIA has a mandate both to run that tourist service, and run some mandatory services to remote communities. The single route it takes is the most efficient way of fulfilling both those roles.

I've indeed answered this question many times, but I'll try it again:


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Why some routes are still served by VIA, whereas others aren't anymore

Originally Posted by someone123

Yeah, the bottom line is the service levels are poor even in parts of the country like Southern Ontario which could support really good rail service. If you travel to other developed countries VIA starts to look pretty bad. To add insult to injury some of the routes that do exist are impractical, and there is little rhyme or reason to which places have service (a real example of a reason is probably something along the lines of whether an area voted for the Liberals or PCs in the early 90's).

First of all, if you want to see the same frequencies and travel speeds as on the Corridor (just with more modern equipment and less delays), I highly recommend Portugal (or Southeastern Europe):



However, to understand why VIA operates the network it operates, one needs to look at its mandate, as I've outlined on Urban Toronto:

As outlined in its Corporate Plan, VIA's mandate is to operate "Canada’s national passenger rail service, providing intercity and long-haul services as well as regional and essential remote rail transportation" (p.14). Whereas the regional ("remote services" or "Adventure Routes") and long-haul ("trans-continental") services are mandated by the federal government to fulfil its obligations towards rural communities without year-round road access and the provinces (resulting from the 1867 Confederation agreement), there is at least an implicit expectation that its Corridor services should be somewhat commercially viable and I would place the bar at at least 50% cost-recovery (i.e. so that the financial burden to the taxpayer is not higher than the ticket revenues paid by the actual users). As you can see below, all Corridor routes (except the Toronto-Niagara route), but also the Canadian have passed this test for at least 4 consecutive years in a row:

Let's start with the October 1976 VIA timetable (i.e. the first timetable which combined CN and CP services under the VIA brand, which would soon become the Crown Corporation we know today and for which I happen to work):



Transcontinental Mandate


The most straight-forward mandate is the Transcontinental Mandate, as it is directly related to the Conferation Agreement of 1867, which mandated the federal government to ensure the construction and operation of a transcontinental railroad linking the already existing rail network in Upper and Lower Canada with basically all 10 provinces. This is why Tables 1 and 9-14 and 16-20 can be justified by VIA's transcontinental mandate:




So how did VIA get from 13 transcontinental services to only 2? First of all, the 13 tables above actually only refer to 6 separate services, of which CN had already switched 2 (those in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador) from passenger rail to bus service in 1969 (except for the short mixed train between Badger and Deer Lake, which was even extended in 1979 on both sides - to Bishops Falls and Corner Brook - and somehow survived until 1988) and both provinces have since then accepted federal funds in return for allowing the federal government to terminate its commitment towards them and signed off the removal of all tracks.


This leaves 4 services (Ocean, Atlantic, Super-Continental and Canadian), of which 2 survive until today: the Ocean and the Canadian (though with the latter using the historic route of the Super-Continental).


But how did we get from these 4 full-scale transcontinental services to only 2? First, the overlapping branches of the Canadian and Super-Continental were rationalized in 1978 (at the expense of Ottawa-Capreol via CN and Toronto-Sudbury via CP) in order to stop operating two parallel branches, each, to Montreal and Toronto. Then, the Canadian (or at least its route) was eliminated in January 1990 (together with the Montreal branch). To understand this decision, one has first to acknowledge that VIA's mandate only specifies that it has to run a transcontinental service, but not at which exact route or frequency. This has been exploited by the federal government in 1989/90, by testing to the extreme how much VIA's operational expenses (and thus its federal subsidy) could be reduced without failing to deliver on its mandate.


Whether one agrees with the requirement to reduce VIA's transcontinental services (and its subsidy) to the bare minimum, this logic clearly favored focusing on one single route and ditching the CP route: West of Winnipeg, because the CN route connected with the Skeena, thus avoiding to extend that service to Edmonton and to either build a maintenance facility there or to pay CN market rates to either maintain VIA's equipment at their own facilities or to deadhead equipment across the country to VIA's other maintenance facilities (all of which would have needlessly escalated the operating costs). And east of Winnipeg, because it reduced the length over which a remote service would need to be operated (by only operating over one line, the remote sections of the other line would need to be covered by a separate remote service) from 1499 km (Capreol-Hornepayne-Winnipeg) to 484 km (Sudbury-White River, i.e. by two-thirds), which allowed the service to be operated with one single trainset formed by frugal RDC's rather than by two trainsets of HEP cars with sleeper facilities (given the scheduled travel time between Capreol and Winnipeg of approximately 24 hours).

To highlight this, I've extrapolated from VIA's current per-train-km subsidy figures what simply rerouting the Canadian onto CP route would cost and while it would save just over a $1 million in operating costs by itself, the obligation to extend the Skeena to Edmonton and run a separate Capreol-Winnipeg sleeper service (like between 1981 and 1990) would increase the annual subsidy need of all 3 services by $16.5 million (or more than a quarter):


Therefore, I'm inclined to agree with equire that the calculations which led to the decisions of which transcontinental route to keep was driven by cold mathematical considerations much more than by any political motivations:

Originally Posted by esquire

I've heard this repeated over the years but I frankly doubt it.. it sounds like an urban myth. Not that Mazankowski was the kingpin there during the Mulroney years, but that he somehow engineered things to screw Calgary. For one thing, the CN route had operational advantages given that VIA still needed to run the route to Prince Rupert that branched off from it [...]

As it just happens, I had a discussion a few datwith Terence Johnson (the president of Transport Action Canada) and I offered him a back-of-the-envelope calculation that estimate claim that "Restoring the Canadian, the Super Continental, the Atlantic, and the Ocean to daily services could probably be done for $3bn" might only pay for the required fleet and 3 years of operation, while adding another $3 billion would pay for 8 more years of operation:

As imperfectly as it will inevitably be, let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine the order-of-magnitude of restoring VIA's transcontinental to such a level, by assuming that the per-train-km deficit for operating the Ocean or Atlantic daily would be the same as for the Ocean currently, while the per-train-km deficit for operating the Canadian and Super-Continental daily would be the same as for the Canadian currently.

Extrapolating the subsidy need for such a daily transcontinental network from the per-train-km subsidy figures derived from VIA's Annual Report 2018 [1] would result in an operating deficit (i.e. subsidy need) of $457 million annually, representing an increase by $362 million or almost 4 times the current subsidy for VIA's transcontinental service and would increase VIA's total operational subsidy (i.e. for its entire network) to $635 million, which represents an increase of 133% compared to its current level at $273 million (i.e. more than double VIA's current subsidy need):

[1] https://media.viarail.ca/sites/defau...eport_EN_1.pdf (p. 9)




Unfortunately, this was just the operating costs, as operating such an increased service would also require the acquisition of new fleet, which results in capital costs also to be paid for by the federal government. With Montreal-Halifax operating on a 3-day cycle and Toronto-Vancouver operating on a 8-day cycle, you would need 3 trainsets each on the Ocean and Atlantic and 8 trainsets each on the Canadian and Super-Continental. This results in a requirement of 22 trainsets or 16 more than what is currently required for the Ocean and Canadian (2 and 4 trainsets, respectively).

Let's assume that we would need 20 cars per trainsets to cope with peak demands and maintenance needs and we would need a total of 320 cars (16 trainsets with 20 cars each). VIA Rail just procured 160 cars for $989 million [1] and even though that figure includes the cost for 40 locomotives, you will also need motive power for any increased transcontinental service, so let's just double that price tag to $1.978 billion for 320 cars.

As I said at the beginning, this back-of-the-envelope calculation is far from perfect and I'm neither arguing for or against such an extension, but I'm inclined to say that $3 billion might be sufficient to buy the necessary fleet and operate the service for 3 years, whereas an additional $3 billion might fund the service for another 8 years (thus for a total of 11 years):

[1] http://ontario.transportaction.ca/vi...dsor-corridor/

So much about choosing to keep the CN over the CP route, but this doesn't explain why the Atlantic was sustained as second transcontinental route into Atlantic Canada. However, if we believe the explanation given by Tom Box in the January 1995 issue of the Branchline magazine, political pressure managed to preserve both routes:

Nevertheless, the Atlantic only survived for another 5 years before it was terminated in December 1994 after the National Transportation Agency (NTA) had approved CP's request to abandon their line between Sherbrooke and Saint John. I don't necessarily agree with the notion that VIA's transcontinental service should operate at the lowest-possible operating subsidy which still allows it to fulfill its transcontinental mandate, but the current design of its transcontinental network and service is a clear reflection of this policy goal.



Inter-City Mandate

In total, there were 14 routes which VIA inherited from CN and CP, of which half are still operated as VIA's "Corridor" services:



Of the seven discontinued routes, 3 services (Quebec - Trois-Rivieres - Montreal, Montreal - Montebello - Ottawa and Toronto - Welland - Buffalo) couldn't capitalize on end-to-end travel due to the presence of faster and more attractive parallel routes (via Drummondville, Alexandria or Niagara Falls), 2 services (Montreal-Sherbrooke and Havelock-Toronto) covered distances which rather fall into a provincial mandate (Commuters) than a federal one (Intercity), with the two remaining routes having seen their viability fading away due to uncompetitive travel times (Saskatoon-Regina) or a series of serious level crossing accidents which eroded public acceptance of that service (Calgary-Edmonton).



Remote Services

Finally, there are 8 routes shown in the October 1976 timetable which can be classified as a "remote" service (that is: serving communities without year-round ground transportation access):



Of these routes, 6 routes are still operated (4 by VIA, 1 by the Keewatin Railway Company and 1 by Ontario Northland) and 2 had to be terminated after CN was granted permission to remove the tracks (Senneterre - Cochrane and Thunder Bay - Sioux Lookout).




Other services

However, this still leaves so many services which we haven't accounted for yet and which have disappeared since 1976 that we have to divide them between east of Winnipeg and west of Winnipeg.

East of Winnipeg, there are 22 of these unaccounted services, of which 2 were operated with buses and 2 operated by CN as commuter services, which were subsequently transferred to GO. Of the 18 remaining services, all have full road access to all communities along the route:



West of Winnipeg, there are 16 of these unaccounted services, of which 5 were operated with buses or ferries and 1 was operated by the Atlantic Dominion Railway as mixed train for presumably not much past 1976. Of the 10 remaining services, all have full road access to all communities along the route:



Interestingly, three services survived for a few years beyond the 1990 cuts, despite having full road access: Moncton - Saint John (as part of the Atlantic's route until its termination in 1994), Gaspé - Matapedia and Victoria - Courtenay (the latter two were terminated even more recently - in 2013 and 2011 - as track conditions deteriorated below what would allow to safely operate passenger services).



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My apologies for this very lengthy (but hopefully informative) post, but I hope that this post shows that the shrinking of VIA's network reflects the cold logic of serving a narrow mandate with a tight mandate much more than political horse trades...