News of Via’s death barely exaggerated
OF THE 41 ROUTEs the rail service comprised at its inception in the 1970s, only 19 remain
Asan American who rides Via Rail trains at least once a year — usually on the busy Quebec CityWindsor corridor — I’ve developed a taste for this convenient and comfortable mode of travel. I’ve also developed an insatiable curiosity about why Via Rail is far more beleaguered than its U.S. counterpart, Amtrak.
That Amtrak is flourishing is something that Quebecers can see for themselves just by crossing the border to Maine, where, with state financial help, passenger service between Portland and Boston was restored in 2001 after a 36-year hiatus.
The service was so successful that in 2012 the route was extended 50 kilometres to Brunswick, where passenger trains last ran in 1960. There are similar success stories in many other places.
But many of the splendid Via Rail trips I’ve taken are no longer possible. They range from the cute selfpropelled rail diesel cars I once rode to Sydney and Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, and on Vancouver Island, to blessed overnight runs on Via’s Montreal-Halifax train by way of Saint John, N.B., and its Montreal-Gaspé train, a service that has been suspended since August. It hasn’t ended … yet.
Amtrak and Via Rail were created by their respective national governments in the 1970s to take over the loss-ridden passenger services of the railroads that traditionally operated them — Canadian Pacific and Canadian National in Canada’s case. But Via and Amtrak have confronted their challenges much differently. Just ask David Gunn, as I did recently.
I telephoned Gunn, a passenger railroad man through and through, in Cape Breton, N.S., where he lives in retirement after a career that included running the Toronto and New York City transit systems before heading Amtrak from 2002 to 2005.
The 76-year-old Gunn, whose forebears were Canadian, has a reputation for speaking bluntly, and he did not disappoint.
He confirmed the accuracy of his little-noticed remarks to a New Brunswick newspaper last summer in which he said: “Via has basically been going out of busi- ness. All of the actions from Via have been basically reducing service since it was set up.”
And he stood by his mockery of the statement by Via’s soon-to-depart president and chief executive officer, Marc Laliberté, as he reported the railroad’s 2013 secondquarter results, that “we continued to develop a train culture in Canada.” Retorted Gunn at the time: “I don’t know too many countries that develop a train culture by cutting the number of trains and closing stations.” Via Rail declined to respond to Gunn’s criticisms.
Of the 41 routes that comprised Via at its inception, only 19 remain.
By contrast, Amtrak is a much bigger, better operation. Since its inception in 1971, Amtrak has more than doubled its number of routes (to 45) and increased its number of trains by two-thirds (to about 300 a day). Service quality is harder to quantify, but ridership speaks for itself. In its fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the railroad carried a record 31.6 million passengers. (It has posted ridership gains in all but one of the last 11 years.)
Amtrak also chalked up record revenues in 2013. Unless Via execut- ed a sharp turnaround in the final quarter of last year, it’s on track to post its second consecutive year of lower revenues. To be sure, Via says ridership is growing in its Quebec City-Windsor corridor, which generates at least 80 per cent of its revenues. A year ago, the railroad added 28 departures a week on the Quebec City-Ottawa-Toronto portion, as well as a direct service between Ottawa and Quebec City. The corridor has benefited from an unprecedented $1-billion investment in capital improvements by the Harper government since 2007. These include renewing rail cars and locomotives and installing a new, third track on certain sections of the Montreal-Toronto route to reduce delays caused by freight trains.
But the railroad says its revenues have declined from 2012 mainly because of the reduction in service frequencies last year on Via’s Toronto-Vancouver and Montreal-Halifax trains, as well as on shorter routes in southwestern Ontario. Canada’s underwhelming economic performance this year undoubtedly hasn’t helped, either.
Despite growing ridership on Via Rail’s corridor routes, Gunn contends that even though the railroad does “a great job on on-board service,” it has failed to build a customer base that’s big enough to help it block future service cuts.
“They haven’t built a local constituency anywhere, including the corridor,” he told me.
When the Mulroney government slashed the number of Via routes by 50 per cent in 1990, Gunn said, “you had people lying down in the tracks because Via still had a fair presence” in many parts of the country. Today, he says, so many communities lack passenger rail service that it’s too late to start a grassroots movement.
Amtrak long has drawn fire from U.S. conservatives, who argue that providing intercity passenger rail service is something best left to private enterprise. Indeed, Gunn says that when he headed Amtrak, the man that President George W. Bush appointed to chair the railroad’s board of directors actually wanted to eliminate funding for the company. But Amtrak received funding anyway.
In the U.S. system, Gunn said, “you have Congress, which has a different opinion on a lot of these mat- ters.” In the parliamentary system, by contrast, “when you have a majority government, they can carry out whatever policy they want.”
Another major contributor to AAnother major contributor to Amtrak’s expansion — which is unlikely to be replicated in Canada — is that many states have been responsible for retaining or, as in Maine’s case, restoring train service within their borders by agreeing to pay for approximately 85 per cent of the operating costs attributed to their routes.
In Canada, however, railways traditionally have been a federal responsibility, so provinces are essentially bystanders.
An exception is the so-called “short-line” railroad that operates in a few cases with provincial financial assistance, within the borders of a single province on tracks abandoned by the major freight railroads. This sometimes has proved problematic for Via Rail. For example, infrastructure problems on the short-line route that Via Rail uses on the Gaspé Peninsula prompted Via to suspend its Montreal-Gaspé service last summer. Service will resume on part of the line on Jan. 7.