Currently VIA's revenue on Sudbury-White River is almost nothing. The costs are 18 times more than the revenue. You wouldn't have to break even, or anywhere close, to save money on the current set up.
The entirety of VIA Rail’s operating expenditure (i.e. including overheads like my own salary) are absorbed by spreading them across its routes. Therefore, the “avoidable costs” might be significantly lower than the figures provided in its Annual Reports, which of course understates whatever cost-recovery rate you calculate from them...
What was VIA's ridership on their Senteterre to Val D'or and Seneterre to Cochrane services previously? I doubt anyone would travel from one end to the other - I thought the idea of remote services was to get those in the middle to elsewhere. Obviously can't get all the way directly from Seneterre to Cochrane any more - the line only goes about half-way these days.
The only section between Senneterre and Cochrane which lacks year-round road access was between La Sarre and Cochrane and it is so devoid of population that service west of Taschereau was already cut from three-times-a-week to only once-a-week in December 1990:
Source: VIA Rail timetable (effective 1990/12/09)
The eastbound departure time was moved into the middle of the night when the connecting Montreal-Senneterre service (which was run with the same equipment) was transformed from an overnight train to a daytime-only service in April 1996:
Source: VIA Rail timetable (effective 1996/04/28)
Only four months later, the service was abandoned west of Senneterre after CN had imposed a 10-mph speed limit over a distance of 80 miles, which made it impossible to reach Cochrane on any viable schedule and therefore led to the cancellation of apparently the only remaining rail service of that stretch of the Taschereau Subdivision (refer to:
Branchline Magazine, March 1997, pp. 8-16). Interestingly, the approval to abandon this section had already been given in a
CTA ruling dated September 1990, but service somehow survived for another 6 years...
I don't see any need to cover most of the mainline. Mostly to find cheaper ways to cover existing services.
This doesn't change the fact that even a freight service departing Vancouver or Calgary at a fixed time every 3 days could show up in White River at basically any time of the week, which makes it impossible for passengers to catch the one freight train which happens to have passenger cars without basically setting up a tent next to the tracks and waiting with a few days' worth of food supplies until it eventually arrives...
Would it really cost CP $3.6 million a year to add a passenger car to 3 existing freight trains a week from Sudbury to White River?
The question is not what operating expenses CP would incur, but what level of extra revenue could motivate them to alter their operations to allow for picking up passengers at flag stops. Even a payment representing the full deficit of $3.6 million would represent a mere 0.05% (or one-two-thousandth) of
CP's revenues of $7.3 billion in 2018. There certainly is a price-point at which CN and CP would be willing to re-enter the passenger rail business, but it would be insane to expect that this could yield any cost reductions for the taxpayer...