Urban Sky
Senior Member
Just to be sure: I never proposed the "Netherlands vision" as a template for the future Lakeshore service, I only mentioned it to show that in other countries, such a corridor would be considered a viable corridor even for very frequent service. Future service will certainly have a lower nominal train count, but as my table showed, much less than currently 17 trains per direction are needed to match the current frequencies offered to any of these cities (and especially between these intermediary cities).
As much as trying to predict the future from the past is a bad investment strategy, I find it the most promising strategy when anticipating how the federal government (and especially Transport Canada) would manage post-HFR VIA. Despite the favorite narrative of most "rail entusiasts" and self-declared "rail experts" in this country, VIA's history is not dominated by cuts and decline. Granted, its first 15 years of existance saw a consolidation (mostly by rationalizing the overlapping CN and CP networks) in 1976-1979 and then some cuts in 1981 (partly reversed in 1985) and of course the devastating cuts in 1990. However, since 1990, VIA's network has been remarkably stable and seen considerable growth in the Corridor (just look at QBEC-MTRL, MTRL-OTTW and OTTW-TRTO, which all grew from 3 trains per day to 5, 6 and 10 trains today). In fact, all five routes which disappeared in the last 30 years (the Atlantic, the Chaleau, Senneterre-Cochrane, Pukatawagan-Lynn Lake, Victoria-Courtenay) were lost due to infrastructure issues (and we are not talking about the downgrade-to-80-rather-than-100-mph category).
In the same way, the frequencies the federal government has allowed VIA to offer seem to generally respect the "minimum frequencies" outlined in Schedule 1 of the legislature enacting the 1990-01-15 cuts, which happen to match the January 1990 timetable. Besides the once-weekly mixed train Wabowden-Churchill and the third frequency of the The Pas-Pukatawagan train, all routes continue to operate at frequencies which respect the "minimum frquencies" I just mentioned. The only rupture were the 2012 cuts, when the federal government imposed a budget cut onto VIA, but gave VIA the liberty to decide where these cuts would do the least damage, which reduced the frequencies offered between London&Sarnia, Toronto&Niagara Falls and (during winter only) on the Canadian below the 1990 levels:
Note: service levels below those of 1990 are highlighted in orange (when caused by infrastructure issues) or yellow (when caused by funding cuts)
Apart from the 1990 cuts, the federal government's approach to VIA seems to have been "the status quo with limited incremental changes" and it is not surprising that this has also become VIA's own approach during the last decades (one just needs to recall the obscure Friday-only stop of train 26 in Coteau, which has survived since 1992 in VIA's schedules...). Therefore, I am not exactly sure why people here seem to expect that the federal government would abandon its commitment towards the people in Port Hope, Cobourg, Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Cobourg (which collectively account for 400,000 people) the moment HFR gets introduced. That of course doesn't guarantee current service levels, but I would again look at the 1990 levels as an indication of what Ottawa might be considering a "minimum service" (and again, except for two short periods in Smiths Falls and Trenton Junction, the number of trains stopping at a given station has never fallen below the 1990 levels):
All of this does of course not replace a firm indication from the government of what kind of service it would support along the Kingston Subdivision (if you insist that it wouldn't recover its direct costs). Nevertheless, in absence of such indications, I believe that past behavior is the best guidance we have for now to make such predictions...
You would not just require separate tracks, but also the ROW owner ceding dispatching powers - over tracks laid on his lands...
In my personal view, the only way to adequately serve the end-to-end markets (MTRL-OTTW, MTRL-TRTO, OTTW-TRTO) and the intermediary markets (anything from/to other stations) is to serve all end-to-end markets with one single service and all intermediary markets with a different service achieving the same. Anything else will either result in high operating costs or the large variety of hybrid trains we currently have and which struggle to serve any market adequately. If you fill out the following table with the frequencies for different hypothetical scenarios, we can have a deeper look at these trade-offs:
| From | via | To | Distance (km) | Scenario A | Scenario B | Scenario C |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| QBEC | TRIV | MTRL | 277 | |||
| QBEC | DRMV | MTRL | 272 | |||
| MTRL | ALEX | OTTW | 187 | |||
| MTRL | CWLL | KGON | 285 | |||
| OTTW | SMTF | KGON | 192 | |||
| KGON | TRTO | 254 | ||||
| OTTW | P'boro | TRTO | 400 |
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