Monday, November 25, 2024

Strathroy, finally...

I've written a lot about railways in southern Ontario over the years, mainly because that is where I grew up. One place that I've had precious little to share anything about is Strathroy, a small town at the southwestern edge of Middlesex County. The town lends its name to the Canadian National Strathroy Subdivison. Strathroy is amalgamated into the surrounding Caradoc Township. Located about 35 kilometres west of London, it boasts some small scale manufacturing operations, not to mention agricultural and food processing businesses, largely centered around turkey breeding and chickens. 

I've been asked in the past if I had anything to share from Strathroy and I've always said no, sadly. Until now. First, a bit of railway context.

Not far east from Strathroy in Komoka, you will find the junction between the CN Strathroy Subdivision and the Chatham Subdivision, a rail line that is now largely used by Via Rail for its Toronto-Windsor service. Also, you will find a junction nearby with the CP Windsor Subdivision. The point is, Caradoc Township, and Strathroy in particular, owe much of their development to the railways. 

Strathroy still maintains daily flag stop Via Rail service, as Via's Sarnia-Toronto trains call on the town's station in each direction once a day, upon request. The station is an unheated shelter now, which is common in small communities on this line. But the town once boasted a large train station, reminiscent of the station in Sarnia at the western end of the subdivision.

In my time on Via Rail trains, mostly in university in the late 1990s, I don't recall the train stopping in Strathroy very much, if ever. I suppose it would be hard to remember a tiny shelter on the side of tracks.

Earlier this month, I paid a visit to family on the Remembrance Day weekend, since I had family business to attend to in Windsor (more on that in a later post). 

Whenever I travel home, I leave Highway 402 at the Centre Street exit in Strathroy. I follow Centre Street until I reach Napperton Road, a county road that becomes the Confederation Line in Lambton County, which parallels the Strathroy Sub between Strathroy and Sarnia. 

On my way west on Nov. 8, I took a quick glance over at the tracks and saw a CN eastbound freight making its way toward Strathroy. I was able to turn my car around and head back east toward Strathroy, where I turned onto Pike Road, as the western edge of the town, to try and capture some images.

Given the very tight time I had and the restricted visibility at the crossing, I had to make do with less-than-ideal sight lines. I did, however, have time to get to the sunny side of the train before the crossing guards were activated.

I had a choice, as I was the first car waiting at the crossing, to get close and get a very tightly angled shot, or stay back a bit and get a shot with a more forgiving angle, but less of the train in view. I chose to stay back. The eastbound was led by CN ES44DC 2256.

CN C44-9W 2578 was next in line. Given I was in my car, I had to include my rear view mirror in the shot. It couldn't be avoided. I had no time and no place to set up a shot on the side of the road. Safety first.

Given the harsh late afternoon sun I was contending with, the going away shot was a little more forgiving, although that hydro pole couldn't be avoided. This was not an ideal spot to set up! But you have to take what you can get sometimes. 

This was the payoff for doubling back to Pike Road. This train was quite short and overpowered, as it only had about 20-30 cars. But at the end of the train, there were about five flat cars carrying these massive metal rings. Are they used for city water mains or pipes? Possibly they are used as braces when boring a tunnel or pipe? I'm not sure.

Whatever these rings were used for, I was happy to get a shot of some pretty rare cargo, not to mention a shot of a train in a new location. It was a cool moment for me on my way home to see family.

The last car in the consist was a heavily graffitied steel coil car, which made for another interesting image. As railfans today, many of the trains we see offer very little in the way of variety. This small train had a bit of everything. 

I managed to snag a lot of varied rail photography on my trip to southern Ontario, including a few shots in Windsor, some nighttime shots on the CN St. Clair River Industrial Spur and a rare shot of a CSX interchange train deep in CN's Sarnia yard. It was a great weekend filled with good times with family and a few really great bonus moments trackside. 

A nice break from this year's steady stream of Via Rail content.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Grand slam in Stratford (Part II)

In my first post about this strange lash-up I saw in Stratford, I shared some  photos of the CN crew bringing a short string of cars into Stratford's rail yard. The crew did a little switching, which was perfect for someone like me who never gets to see freight trains. My time in Stratford earlier this summer was quite prolific from a railfanning perspective. Not only did I get shots of a unique triple-header leading a CN freight, I also was able to catch an inbound Goderich Exeter Railway train returning from the Goderich Sub.

So you would think that would have been enough for one trip. And it was. However, I was surprised when I returned to the yard the following day for a quick peak to see this consist coming into the yard, with the same triple header I saw the day before.

CN had clearly kept the trio of geeps together for a return trip to the yard on July 19. This time, it was the BNSF geep in the lead, bring in a mixed load of mainly tank cars and a few covered hoppers. I tried to get a shot of the train emerging from behind the parked cars in the yard, as it made its way toward Romeo Street and the Masterfeeds elevator storage facility.

I also tried to frame the local with the entire elevator in the frame, just to give myself an idea of the scale of the Masterfeeds operations against the small consist. At least this way, I didn't have to fight the heat swivels coming up from the ground, which is always an issue in the summer when you are using the zoom on my camera. You can see the two searchlight signals showing the crew what it was allowed to do. The main line is red over red while the secondary track is red over green.

I don't take a lot of close-up shots of power anymore. I prefer shots where the train shares the frame with some other element of the landscape. In this case, the trio of geeps was too rare for me not to capture it in its own shot.

While I was in the yard, I made sure to try and find some unique rolling stock. I did spot these old Burlington Northern ribbed covered hoppers, which were in pretty decent shape considering how old they are.

That was the last really cool surprise before my family returned home from our trip. It was a really fun time for my kids and it was a very peaceful time for me at the rail yard at a time when I needed it. Great railway therapy.

Thursday, November 7, 2024

The two worst policy failures that plague Via Rail

Via Rail Canada's painfully public problems with its new Venture trainsets from Siemens are tough to watch, especially when it seems as though some of these problems could have been avoided. Having worked in the federal public service for 15 years now, I can say with some authority that I know how politics work. This experience is what made the recent federal government announcement that Canada will pursue high-speed rail laughable.

When you consider the Via-CN swipes over who's to blame for the Ventures speed restrictions and then consider the government's high-speed rail daydream, it all comes back to politics. That's unfortunate because we live in a time when passenger rail has become the norm in many parts of the world. It's the safest and most efficient means of moving people over short- to medium-length distances.

Yet, we here in Canada can only sit back and watch Via Rail push back its arrival times across the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, due to its Ventures being slapped with speed restrictions by CN. And all the while, the government is finally taking notice of high-speed rail as a possibility, but hardly in a serious way.

Via Rail has had plenty of turbulent moments in its history. What's happening now isn't all that different, but I think the stakes this time around are much, much higher. That is why we need to understand how the government has failed its own passenger rail system, if we are to prevent situations like this from happening again.

The beginnings: I asked Trackside Treasure blogger Eric Gagnon, my go-to expert on all matters Via Rail, to figure out if he could remember a time when the passenger railway was ever given better treatment by its host railways (CP and CN). The short answer is no. When Eric explained it to me, it made perfect sense. 

Passenger railway operations lose money and there's no reasonable way to fix that problem. When Via Rail was created, first as a rebranded passenger operation within CN, and then as a standalone operation, there was no incentive for CN to give Via Rail any preferential treatment on its tracks. After all, why should it? And there was even less incentive for CP to do the same, as it was not a Crown corporation at the time when Via was created, as CN was.

Here's where I wonder if the government could have done more. As CN was indeed a Crown corporation when Via Rail was created and spun off, doesn't it seem reasonable that the government of the day, led by Pierre Trudeau, would want to give Via every opportunity to succeed?

The answer, sadly, was no. The government of the day would have had more leverage in clearing a path for Via, as CN was a Crown corporation. But the creation of Via in some ways mirrored the creation of Amtrak in the United States. The goal was to get the freight railways back to profitability. I don't think the incentive was ever to create a successful passenger railway. It might have been a product of the times, when air travel and highways were generally seen as higher priorities by most governments. Those priorities have changes over the years, but rail is still very often an afterthought.

In hindsight, perhaps some government legislation arranging for better terms for a passenger railway might have given Via a better chance to establish itself with a good reputation. A recent article on CBC's website suggests Amtrak's better on-time record is a product of the U.S. government mandating more strict terms for its host freight railways. I don't know if that is necessarily true. I think the more meaningful point in the article is that Via claims is only owns 2 percent of the tracks it uses. I would think Amtrak's northeast corridor trackage, which it owns and where most of its trains run, would also account for its higher on-time percentage. However, I also think it is misleading for Via to say it only owns 2 percent of its trackage. Is it including the trackage it uses for the Canadian, Ocean and its Churchill trains? If so, that is a lot of trackage in its network that hosts essentially three trains.
 

Rail abandonment: Here's an area of government policy where I lean very heavily on people I know who are in the industry. As most know, Ottawa has seen its rail network shrink dramatically in the last 20 years, especially after CN took over the Ottawa Central Railway from the shortline operator that ran the operation. 

I have asked more than one person in the industry if Canada has strong policies in place that ensure rights-of-way can stay intact when a railway abandons operations on the line. Short answer is no, we don't. 

Ottawa witnessed a drawn-out struggle between CN and the municipalities of Renfrew County and the Pontiac region in Quebec when it announced plans to abandon the line from Pembroke all the way to Nepean Junction. 

The end result was fairly predictable as the local governments lost their fight to maintain the rail line, which they both sought to use as an economic driver in their regions. I recall the former head of the OCR telling me they already had a customer lined up with the promise of hundreds of car loads of freight each year. It was hardly enough to justify such a long stretch of track, but it was a beginning. 

Now consider what is today technically known as the Renfrew Subdivision or Spur, owned by Nylene Canada in Arnprior. CN has long wanted to abandon this line and sought more than once to discontinue service. The only measure to stop it was a government mandate to maintain service to Nylene under the terms of the arrangement where Nylene owns the line and the City of Ottawa owns the land where the line sits. It is possible to save rails. The government just doesn't seem to want to do it very often.

How does this relate to Via Rail?

Consider the fact that the government dreams of having a high speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City, which sits largely on a former rail line that once connected Toronto and Ottawa. The process to reacquiring this right-of-way will be expensive and likely time consuming, as people who are affected will no doubt fight any attempts to re-establish rails. 

Consider as well that the Canadian once travelled through Ottawa and Carleton Place on the old Carleton Place Subdivision, before heading up the Chalk River Sub and onto the northern transcontinental route. This was back when this service had an eastern terminus in both Montreal and Toronto.

Both the Carleton Place and Chalk River Subs are gone, and with them, any chance to re-establish routes that Via Rail could use. I'm not saying that we need to keep every abandoned line for Via, but I think an argument can be made to strengthen government policy to prevent scenarios like the one the government now faces. Once a rail line is abandoned and sold off, there is no going back. Not easily anyway.

Now consider that Via Rail uses the old CN Smiths Falls Sub and the CP Brockville Sub for its service between Ottawa and Brockville. Both of these lines were deemed surplus by the railways and both were kept to maintain Via's busy operations between Toronto and Ottawa. The same is true of the Alexandria Sub, between Ottawa and Coteau, Quebec. Via controls and maintains all these lines.

What if the CP line through Peterborough had been kept and the connection to Ottawa via Smiths Falls was intact? Would we be talking about operational delays with the Ventures right now? Possibly not as many.

My point is government policy, from what I'm told, is not as strong as it is elsewhere, like in the United States. This is from what I read and from what I am told. I tend to agree with this point of view.

The obvious failures: I'm purposely leaving out obvious failures on the part of Via Rail, like the purchase of the notoriously unreliable Renaissance fleet from Europe, which proved to be a disaster that was quickly buried. These cars, which never operated properly in the corridor, were essentially demoted to the Ottawa-Montreal route, along with service on the Ocean between Montreal and Halifax. When I talk about government failures, I'm talking about the failures of the elected governments of the day and the public servants who inform those governments, in their jobs to support Via Rail. 

The obvious cuts: I'm also putting aside the decisions of governments past to chop Via Rail service. Yes, this is a failure in a way, although a counter argument can usually be made that some of the cuts were necessary. It depends how you look at them. Most people who follow the railway industry would argue the cuts were far too deep and caused lasting damage that Via was never able to recover from, but I can see the logic behind some of the cuts. I think the cuts Via Rails suffered can only qualify as a failure if they were made to routes where there was robust demand and good revenue margins. Cutting underserved routes is painful to the communities along that line, but sometimes they were necessary. And to be fair, passenger rail has seen cuts since the Second World War. This is nothing new.

My point is, if you want to have a successful passenger rail system in Canada, you need to give the railway sound policy for it to succeed. That starts with better prioritization of passenger trains when possible. This was a missed opportunity from Via's creation in the late 1970s. The other element is you need sound policy to ensure that rail lines are not torn up without a robust process in place to ensure their future use, if deemed necessary.

I could go on extensively about cuts or about the various minsters of transportation that didn't 'get' railways. To me, the easiest policy fixes for Via are federal mandates ensuring a higher priority on freight lines and a process that doesn't result in lost rail lines that might be of future use.

Those two elements, to me, should be on the mind of the government, not some high speed rail pipe dream that will never survive under the next government.