Smiths Falls a potential hub for high-frequency Via rail
The mayor of Smiths Falls sees “nothing but positive” for the town as the plans for a high-frequency rail service from Ottawa to Toronto take one step closer to reality.
“For Smiths Falls, it's incredibly positive news,” says Mayor Shawn Pankow. “And it's something that will enable us to continue to transform our community. We would serve as a hub.”
And though the announcement last week by the federal government is an incremental one — “the first steps in preparing for the procurement process” in what is in all likelihood an election year — Pankow said he's optimistic the decades-old dream of improved passenger service will come true.
“This is high priority for the current government. Beyond the benefits of increasing the service for their customers, the greening initiative of hybrid trains, the reduced emissions, getting people off highways and onto rail — it has a lot of positives,” he said. “I think it's essential.”
Currently, three trains a day between Ottawa and Toronto pass through Smiths Falls. But because Via Rail shares the tracks with freight trains, its passenger trains often have to wait on sidings for high-priority freight to pass. The passenger trains are forced to run slower than they're able to and are frequently pushed off schedule. Via says the new tracks would keep trains on schedule 95 per cent of the time, compared its current 67 per cent.
The new route would roughly follow the Highway 7 corridor with stops at Fallowfield, Smiths Falls, Peterborough, and Eglinton in north Toronto. The trains could run at full speed of up to 200 km/h, cutting travel time from Ottawa to Toronto by 90 minutes. Via and the government project the service could carry up to 17 million passengers along the Toronto- Quebec City corridor by 2059, compared to the 4.8 million it now carries.
The new line, with service that is “high frequency” rather than the more expensive “high speed,” will use cleaner electrified trains and include new stops in Trois-Rivières, and Laval as well as a stop near Quebec City's Jean Lesage Airport.
Matti Siemiatycki, a professor at the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute who studies megaprojects, calls the proposed high-frequency train service “interesting, ambitious and, perhaps, optimistic.”
“You have to feel for Via,” Siemiatycki said. “They don't own much of the track. The service is where most of their ridership is and the source of most of their revenue. (But) it's depreciating in quality and any solution will cost billions of dollars. It's a really unenviable position.”
Via has been toying with the idea a new northern line away from the busy Highway 401 corridor since at least 2014 with its “Shining Waters” route, passing once busy railway centres like Peterborough, Sharbot Lake, Perth and Smiths Falls. The request for procurement proposals is expected to go out this fall.
“Via has to do something,” Siemiatycki said. “The service is getting worse and it's getting harder for them to attract riders. I get why they're going for this.
“But the costs are huge,” he said, adding that he'd like to know more about the cost-versus-benefits of the line. One of the steps announced last week was to begin talks with existing rail companies to give the new passenger service access into the major centres, which Siemiatycki says will be one of the trickier problems to resolve.
“And it's not just the long-haul tracks, it's also the tracks into the city. That's where a lot of the bottleneck happens,” he said. “There's still the problem of how do you get into and out of the cities, which remains to be resolved.”
Running the trains along Highway 7 also excludes some of the largest population centres along the route, such as Kingston and Belleville, although Via's plan does include a link along the existing route between Smiths Falls and Brockville. Via has said existing service along the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Toronto will be maintained and even improved. Even so, Siemiatycki thinks Via's passenger projections are overly rosy.
“I think that's the part of that announcement that was the most optimistic,” he said. “It would be interesting to know how the projections are being made and what they're being based on. All this to say, I think there's a long way to go here before anyone is riding a high-frequency train in this corridor. The distances we're talking about here, if you look at a European context, would have tens of millions of people to draw on. In China, potentially hundreds of millions of people.”
Whether passengers would be willing to switch from flying to high-frequency trains also remains “an open question,” he said.
In Smiths Falls, Pankow remains hopeful. Reliable train service could spur population growth, even if in a post-COVID world people might only need to go into their jobs in Ottawa for a few days a week.
“It would put more pressure on housing and some of our services, but it would enable us to continue on the path of growth that we've been committed to for a number of years,” he said. The town would need a new railway station — something Via has already promised — that would be centrally located in town.
“The railway has been a big part of our history and based on what we're understanding now from Via, it's going to be a big part of our future,” Pankow said. Siemiatycki remains cautious. “Rail has always been one of those areas where the benefits tend be overpromised and the costs underestimated,” he said.
“If someone is announcing improvements to intercity rail, it must be an election year.”