The Government of Canada and VIA Rail announced today a $20 million program to renew and improve two key components of its nationwide locomotive and rolling stock fleet, funded from the $407 million investment in passenger rail improvements under the Government of Canada’s Economic Action Plan.

“It gives me great pleasure to announce the overhaul of 78 cars and 21 locomotives for improved service across VIA Rail’s transcontinental network,” said the Honourable Rob Merrifield, Minister of State (Transport). “Combined with the other capital projects announced recently, it will give Canadians a more efficient, reliable and comfortable passenger rail network”.

“Equally satisfying for all of us at VIA is the fact that this program will create and maintain skilled employment, contributing to the government’s strategy of employment and economic stimulus”, said VIA Chief Operating Officer, John Marginson. “This initiative is creating 58 positions at VIA’s Montreal Maintenance Centre (MMC): 51 positions for the HEP 1 project and seven positions for the P-42 locomotives. When coupled with our other fleet renewal programs, it adds up to the largest investment ever in Canadian passenger rail equipment”, added Marginson.

This project includes the renovation and upgrade of 78 HEP 1 long-haul cars of various types and of 21 P-42 diesel-electric locomotives. The HEP 1 stainless steel cars are primarily assigned to VIA’s world-renowned Toronto-Vancouver streamliner, the Canadian, which is an important contributor to Canada’s tourism industry. The P-42 locomotives haul VIA’s fastest trains in the busy Quebec-Windsor Corridor.

The first of the 78 HEP 1 stainless steel cars to be overhauled will be 40 Manor sleeping cars, followed by the dining cars, Skyline dome-buffet-lounge cars and other car types within the fleet. The overhaul will include new and brighter interior carpeting, wall designs and upholstery. Mechanical work will include the renewal of the electrical, drinkable water, heating/ventilating/air conditioning and underframe systems. This overhaul of VIA’s long-distance trains will proceed at the rate of seven cars per month. The first cars are scheduled for completion this fall.

The P-42 program includes work on the underframe systems, main diesel engine, alternator and generator. As well, there will be minor structural repairs and touch-ups of the car body, along with winterization programs. This will prepare the P-42s for another 1.6 million kilometers or eight years of reliable service.

About VIA’s fleet renewal program

These programs fleet renewal programs are part of an unprecedented investment by the Government of Canada in the improvement and expansion of passenger rail service across the country. It is being funded under a $516 million passenger rail capital improvement program announced in October 2007 and another $407 million investment under the Economic Action Plan.

About VIA Rail Canada

As Canada’s national rail passenger service, VIA Rail Canada’s mandate is to provide efficient, environmentally sustainable and cost-effective passenger transportation, both in Canada’s business corridor and in remote and rural regions of the country. Every week, VIA operates 503 intercity, transcontinental and regional trains linking 450 communities across its 12,500-kilometre route network.

For further information: Malcolm Andrews, Via Rail Canada Inc., (514) 871-6604; Chris Hilton, Office of Minister of State (transport), (613) 991-0700

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Canada By Train: The Complete VIA Rail Travel Guide

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OTTAWA — The head of Canada’s national passenger rail service says that the Crown corporation is ready to make a fast start on high speed rail service and is prepared to be a key player in any new project introduced by the federal government.

Via Rail Canada President and CEO Paul Côté said that ridership and operations have improved consistently over the past two decades, creating a base for a more advanced system. In the meantime, he said, new capital investments of almost $1 billion announced in 2007 are opening the door to faster service.

“The current investment of $900 million that the government has allowed us to do will help to continue to build that foundation, because that is the key, when the high speed systems comes into play, if the government goes ahead,” said Côté who appeared last week at parliamentary hearings about high speed rail. “The ridership of the franchise needs to be built to achieve that.”

Côté told the House of Commons Transport committee that the corporation has increased its ridership by 33 per cent and its revenues by 110 per cent since 1990 because of improvements to service and infrastructure.

“I can assure you that the people at Via Rail have the competence, the expertise and the motivation (to become a partner in a high speed rail project),” said Côté. “If we are allowed to do this and if the context permits, Via Rail will be able to show its expertise, quality and experience developed over all the years.”

Côté also said he welcomes U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement of billions in new spending under a plan that is exploring nearly a dozen high-speed corridors in the U.S., including regions that would reach Montreal, Vancouver, Windsor and possibly Buffalo, near Toronto. He acknowledged, however, that Obama’s approach is different approach from that of federal and provincial governments in Canada.

The provincial governments in Quebec and Ontario, along with the federal government, are updating a 1995 study on high speed rail that estimated a line between Quebec City and Windsor could be built over 10 years at a cost of about $18 billion. A private consortium of firms is leading the study in consultation with representatives from the three governments and is expected to make recommendations in 2010.

“I know that there is some impatience that some people would like it to be faster,” Côté said. “But that’s the way the governments decided to go. So we will offer our assistance to make it happen and at the end we will have a very well documented storyline for high speed rail.”

Via Rail had developed a $3 to $4 billion plan several years ago to introduce an improved service with trains going at up to 200 km/h in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor. The plan could have been implemented following an announcement of new infrastructure spending in the fall of 2003 by former prime minister Jean Chretien’s Liberal government. But former prime minister Paul Martin cancelled the spending, closing the door on a project which already had support from other partners such as CN and CP Rail.

Under its current plan, Via Rail will continue to use trains that can go up to 160 km/h on the Quebec City-Windsor corridor but which often face delays since they share tracks with freight trains that have priority.

An Alberta-based research institute said that a high-speed train between Calgary and Edmonton also could have a profound impact in that region.

“I think the important thing about the high-speed rail, and the interesting thing about it, is that it would fundamentally change that corridor,” said Teresa Watts, an associate from the Van Horne Institute, at the parliamentary hearings last week. “It would change it from a corridor with two centres that at one time were competing into a complement of one million people, effectively shrinking distance because of that link, to a unit of three million people. I think that it has to be linked to a broader vision of economic development. It’s not simply a transportation solution, but it is a provincial shaper of that corridor, which has been such a juggernaut of growth over the last decade.”

The Alberta government commissioned a feasibility study on the project that was due nearly two years ago, but it has not made it public.

Source: By Mike De Souza, Canwest News Service

VIA Rail Canada: The Canadian Travel Experience

Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro is a big advocate for high-speed rail service between some of Canada

Source Link: By David Akin, The Gazette

OTTAWA — The MP who leads the non-partisan “rail caucus” in the House of Commons is pushing a new high-speed rail plan — a super-fast tri-city train link between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.

“If you were to start a line that connected these three major centres, you would have a line that would be well-supported, would offer significant economic benefits, and, obviously, you’d have significant environmental benefit,” said Dean Del Mastro, a Conservative MP from Peterborough, Ont.

Del Mastro said that, given the geography such a line would run through, the trains would probably be limited to speeds of about 240 kilometres an hour but that would still cut the rail ride between Ottawa and Toronto, which now takes a little more than four hours, down to about two hours.

It would trim the hour-and-forty-five minute trip between Ottawa and Montreal to around 40 minutes. An express between Montreal and Toronto could take travellers from downtown to downtown in about two-and-a-half hours. The fastest ride now takes about four-and-a-half hours.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest, at last fall’s First Ministers Conference here, was trying to sell the federal government on the merits of a high-speed rail line from Quebec City to Windsor, Ont. using the corridor that runs along the shores of the St. Lawrence River and then Lake Ontario.

It’s an idea that’s been around for about two decades but various levels of government have balked at the multi-billion dollar price tag for such a service.

In most earlier formulations, such a high-speed line, which requires its own dedicated track, would service Quebec City, Montreal, Kingston, Ont., Toronto, London, Ont., and Windsor, Ont., but Ottawa would get left out of the picture.

Del Mastro believes that a less ambitious project that avoids the lakeshore right-of-way in favour of a sweeping curve north through Ottawa makes more economic sense.

“I think we’re seeing around the world that rail works, that it makes sense,” said Del Mastro. “It’s a good way to flow goods and people.”

Del Mastro said he and Transport Minister John Baird have not yet discussed the idea. Instead, Del Mastro hopes that those currently studying the viability of high-speed service in the Quebec-Windsor corridor consider his alternative. Last January, the federal government along with the governments of Ontario and Quebec agreed to jointly cover the costs of updating feasibility studies on high-speed service between Quebec and Windsor. Two earlier studies had been done in 1992 and again in 1995.

A spokesperson for VIA Rail said the company would not have any official comment on a Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto high-speed line until a feasibility study on future high speed services is completed.

“We are all waiting very impatiently for the results of these studies and then we will probably have more information,” said Nadia Seraicco, a VIA Rail spokesperson.

Transport Canada was unable to say when those studies would be complete.

But documents obtained by Canwest News Service using access to information laws show that Del Mastro’s idea is a plan that was being pushed last summer by VIA Rail’s president, Donald Wright. Wright met with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on June 16 specifically to discuss a high-speed link between Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto.

Officials in Flaherty’s office were not immediately available for comment.

Meanwhile, high-speed rail enthusiasts say they’re getting impatient with yet more studies. They say it’s time for governments to commit to the kind of high-speed rail lines that are now common in many countries in Europe and Asia.

“In 20 years, there has never been more potential for a high-speed rail project and for rail renewal,” said Paul Langan, founder of the advocacy group High Speed Rail Canada. Langan’s group has organized a symposium on high-speed rail projects in Canada to take place later this month in Kitchener, Ont. “There is no logical argument not to have high-speed. The question just boils down to the political or public will.”