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.

Ottawa's light rail disaster

I have been reluctant to share any thoughts about Ottawa’s new electrified Confederation Line light rail system on this blog. You don’t need to live in Ottawa to know that the launch of the east-west Confederation Line has been an unqualified disaster. There is no other way to describe this system. It was already well past its launch date when it began service in September. Admittedly, hopes were high when it did begin operations, but the problems began almost immediately.

Here is an unofficial summary of what Ottawa commuters have had to face since September.

1. City officials insisted that the trains had to operate flawlessly for 12 consecutive days before actual commuter operations were to begin. That did not happen, but city officials used all sorts of bafflegab and doublespeak to explain away this obvious failure to comply with its own guidelines.

2. The first major problem happened almost immediately when commuters tried to pry doors open when trying to catch a train. This is common in most transit systems. Most buses and subways have safety and redundancy systems that account for this behaviour. The O-Trains could not handle these situations and the doors would remain open after being pried open. The trains would then shut down. The door issue has been resolved through a change in commuter behaviour, but it’s not clear to me that the issue was ever fixed. The city insisted that technical adjustments were made.

3. Switches on the Confederation Line would often not operate normally, which would shut down part or all of the system. This happened multiple times before the issue was largely fixed. It should be noted that this problem has begun to resurface recently, due to winter conditions.

4. The city had told the public that 15 O-Trains would run during peak periods in order to maintain normal 3-minute intervals of service at all stations. The system has not yet had 15 trains working at one time. City officials have quickly changed their tune, saying the number of trains operating during peak periods is 13. No one has ever explained why this has changed.

5. There have been many cases where these trains have shut down for no apparent reason. If there were explanations for these mysterious failures, they were not well communicated with the public or not shared with the public at all.

6. Early on, a piece of the continuous welded rail broke apart, forcing the system to shut down while repairs were made to the (at the time) brand new right-of-way. The city insisted that this is a common occurrence in any rail system. Officials were then forced to admit that this “common occurrence” has never once happened on the Trillium Line since it first began operations in 2001.

7. A long piece of the overhead catenary was torn off its bracing by an O-Train for no apparent reason near Saint Laurent Station. The city never offered any explanation as to why this would happen.

8. Multiple O-Trains experienced power failures around the New Year. In this case, it was explained that the company that maintains the trains had to modify its maintenance practices because the pantographs that pick up the power were being compromised by a mixture of copper shavings from the overhead catenary mixed with rock salt.

9. In the New Year, the entire Confederation Line was severely compromised by a number of flat spots on the train’s wheelsets. The company maintaining the fleet explained eventually that its wheel truing machinery had broken down. The result was that only eight trains were available for use during peak hours for more than a week.

10. On New Year’s Eve, the city offered free rides on the O-Train for those going out for a night on the town. A mysterious failure on one of the trains caused a delay of more than an hour, due to the fact that there was obviously no back-up in place for train failures. Eventually, those stranded on the stopped train did get aboard a replacement bus, but the incident was the latest black eye for the beleaguered system.

11. It took weeks for the city to explain that a faulty sump pump was causing a lingering sewer smell in the underground Rideau Station. The problem has not been totally resolved yet.

12. There are now problems with a rotten egg smell at the underground Lyon Station, for reasons that have not yet been fully explained.

13. The city now says it will take more than a year to fix the electrical problems that are causing untold delays on the Confederation Line.

I mention all these instances as examples of some of the more egregious errors that have happened since this new service was launched. Some of the problems were to be expected with a new system. But the service interruptions have been an almost daily occurrence since December. It’s actually hard to think of a stretch of more than three to four days where the system has operated normally without any problems.

There are three more recent developments that have further eroded any trust the citizens of Ottawa have in our local leadership.

1. The company that is largely responsible for the current Confederation Line, SNC Lavalin, was handed the contract to extend the Trillium Line as part of the Phase II of the system’s expansion. This, despite the fact that the company had failed to meet the minimum technical threshold to advance in the bidding and was disqualified by the city’s own technical evaluation committee. That committee’s decision was overturned by senior city officials, due to a secret power they held to make such an arbitrary decision. It has since been revealed that SNC failed to grasp in its bid that the Trillium Line is not an electrified line, but rather a diesel line. The company’s bid also did not include provisions for snow removal. Yet, they won the bid. The city council has ordered an independent review of this contract process.

2. City officials have only recently come forward publicly with the revelation that the trains they purchased from Alstom, are not terribly reliable in a North American winter. These trains are a specifically modified version of another Alstom train that is used worldwide. However, the fact remains that the trains used here are the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. They are the first to be used anywhere. And, as one city official admitted, they are so far proving to be lemons.

3. Ottawa residents were told that the company that is maintaining the Confederation Line and electric O-Trains has not been paid yet, due to the poor performance of the service since September. Only, that was another lie or half truth from city officials. It was actually revealed that the city, in fact, paid the company, which is called Rideau Transit Maintenance or RTM, $4.5 million.

I won’t offer my opinion, other than a few words. Everything that I have mentioned here is what has been reported. As a taxpayer and commuter, I can only hope that things will get better. I have lost trust in this city’s senior managers and the mayor. This will affect my vote in the next election. But, here’s the obvious truth. This is what happens when you don’t understand railways and have not had to live in a city with overly visible railways for the better part of half a century.