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None, as this (#63/Thu-2023-09-21) has so far been the only revenue service sighting on anything else than QMO services:
tracksidetreasure.blogspot.com
The good thing about these trains is they can be 8-12 hours travel time without it being an issue. So, let it hit every siding and fit in between existing traffic. This is a train that could be slow and be successful. Get on at 9 pm and get off at 6 am. Charge a premium for it.
Why can’t you just answer a simple question? You were asked to provide your definition of “successful” (e.g., in commercial or economic terms), not what city pairs you believe would satisfy that definition…
read the article... funny and sad that one of the comments praised the fact that the train was "only" 17min late.... what a low bar set for service standards.None, as this (#63/Thu-2023-09-21) has so far been the only revenue service sighting on anything else than QMO services:
VIA's Siemens Venture First Revenue Visit to Kingston
This week marked the first revenue visit of a Siemens Venture set to Kingston's VIA station. The first of the 32 new trainsets being built i...
My definition of success is that for most of the route, the rolling stock they choose is 90% full or better.
By that extreme definition, virtually the entire passenger rail network in this country (or in fact: on this planet) is a failure and should be closed…
Not just the railways. With that threshold Air Canada and WestJet are also failures for most of their routes, and when you eliminate those "poor" performing routes the "successful" routes would immediately become "poor" performing too (missing connections).
So, if we accept that the existing routes cannot be "successful", maybe it is time to stop having artificial requirements for something. Maybe it is time to stop looking at the bottom line as the metric for success. All those routes I listed, notice how I am not suggesting silly things like HSR? As much as I think that it would be nice to do those trips in under2hours for the longest ones, it is hard to justify that kind of spending, but a3car train running once a day both ways everyday, that will always make sense to me. That is because I don't look at the funding, but instead look at the freedom it brings. Why can people in Toronto be care free and not feel like a prisoner, but most other major cities you would? It is the non personal vehicle transportation that somewhere like Toronto has that makes it so easy to be carless.
Just because you can‘t come up with a definition of the word „successful“ which helps us distinguish between popular & highly profitable services on one side and those which are spectacular money-losers running mostly empty on the other side (and maybe some gradations inbetween, because not everything is black and white), doesn’t mean that we should completely ignore any commercial or economic/fiscal indicators and just run services according to some arbitrary „minimum service standards by population size“ tables…
When you are a publicly-traded, for-profit industry, the metrics change. I would imagine the airline's profitable routes, at least between larger centres, would do just fine w/o the feeders. Besides, routes can come and go at the whim of the boardroom. I imagine all transportation providers use varying profitability to balance their routes.
VIA currently needs 26 trainsets to operate its Corridor services:
26 trainsets plus 2 guards (one in Montreal and one in Toronto) equals 28 trainsets. Add a maintenance allowance of 10% and you have a base requirement of 31 trainsets…
Given that the 5-7car LRC sets include 1 HEP coach, they are limited to 95 mph. The 4-car trains are presumably the ones hauled by the less-powerful F40PH locomotives, in which case they are also limited to 95 mph.
