Why are Canada’s passenger trains so slow?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Some of my fondest travel memories as a child involved the Via rail passenger trains between Montreal and Toronto. I could get up and walk around. I wasn’t confined to a car seat. There were washroom on the vehicle and this was in the early 1980s, so Canada’s passenger train service was only slightly behind the times. Guess what? My daughter has now ridden the same train, maybe not the exact same car, but the same sort of train on the same train tracks moving at the same speed or even slower than it did in the eighties. That’s a problem. While other countries have dedicated tracks high speed rail and the ability to move masses of people between two cities at speeds of up to 300 kilometres an hour all while staying on schedule, our own passenger trains have not changed at all, like at all. But don’t worry. Years ago, Canada announced a plan, an alternative to the fancy, sleek, high-speed rail that our peer countries enjoy, but a plan that nevertheless would cut travel times on many popular routes like Montreal to Toronto by hours. So what is that plan? More importantly, where are the results of that plan and how did passenger train travel in Canada go so badly off the rails? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Gabrielle Drolet is a freelance writer and reporter based in Montreal. She wrote this piece for Maisonneuve Magazine. Hey Gabrielle.

Gabrielle Drolet: Hi. How are you doing?

Jordan: I’m doing well. Thank you for joining us. I hope you’re not waiting on a train.

Gabrielle Drolet: Thank goodness. I’m not.

Jordan: Okay. Well listen, obviously this is anecdotal, but since I bet a ton of people listening can relate and I can relate. Just quickly tell us your holiday train travel story.

Gabrielle Drolet: So it was December of 2022 and I was traveling back to Montreal after spending Christmas in Stratford, Ontario and the night before I was set to travel, there were so many delays. People were stuck on via rails for 24 hours at a time. The trains were unmoving on the tracks because there was an ice storm and it was a big ice storm, but VIA was completely unrepaired to deal with that there were no maintenance people to come help lift trees that had fallen off of the tracks. There was just nothing repaired. There was no food stocked for emergencies either, so people were just stuck on moving. That

Jordan: Was the one where some people climbed out of the train and just walked away, right?

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah, that’s right. People were jumping onto the tracks in the middle of nowhere and just fighting their own ways home

Jordan: And you’re sitting in Stratford being like, I got to ride this tomorrow.

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah, I was extremely stressed. So all morning before my train leaves, I’m refreshing my email and I was like, my train’s going to be canceled or at least delayed. I’ll get some email and I didn’t, right, so I go to the station, I wait, and the first of my trip was actually very smooth. I went from Stratford to Toronto for my little layover to get to Montreal and it all went well. But then I got to Toronto. I’m waiting for an hour and a half, and then finally it’s time to board and there’s, I don’t know if you’ve ever boarded the VIA rail at Union Station, but it’s pure chaos.

Jordan: Oh, yes.

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah. There’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in this room all waiting to board the respective trains and boarding just didn’t happen. We’re standing there and we’re waiting in line and the time to board comes and goes, and we’re not told anything on the board. It still says boarding at the time you were supposed to board. A few minutes go by that way, and an announcement comes up and they’re like, you’re going to board in five minutes. And then five minutes later it was, you’re going to board in 20 minutes, and then it was you’re going to board in 20 minutes. And that kept happening for almost three hours. I was meant to get home at 8:00 PM and so I got home at 1:00 AM the next day. Subways or the Metro was no longer running. I had to take an Uber. It was this whole thing.

Jordan: Now how does a trip like that that you were making from Toronto to Montreal or Toronto to Quebec compare with just taking a plane at least in terms of speed, cost, impact on the environment? This is what we’re talking about here is why people would take the train, why we want them to. It’s

Gabrielle Drolet: A good question and one that as a very loyal train user, I have wondered a lot because a lot of my friends have sort of switched to taking the plane from Montreal to Toronto or these very short distances. But it is true that train travel is the most environmentally friendly way to travel. But beyond that, there aren’t a lot of benefits. If I were to take the train from Montreal to Toronto, say tomorrow it’s a five hour and 20 minute trip minimum. If there’s no layover, it can be up to eight hours. If I take the same journey from Montreal to Toronto on a plane, it’s an hour and 15 minutes. So it’s about five times the length. And depending on when you book and how lucky or unlucky you get, the cost can be comparable if not higher, to take the train than to

Jordan: Fly. And you mentioned that you are an avid train user. I mean, so am I. Some of my earliest memories when I was a little kid in the early eighties are my parents taking photos of me on the via Montreal to Toronto train, and I used to love it as a kid and I’ve taken it many times as an adult with joyful experiences. But was it always like this? Was there a time when Canada’s trains were great? I mean, theoretically we are the perfect train country.

Gabrielle Drolet: I think it’s gotten worse in recent years, but the thing is it’s always been like this in the sense that they’ve always taken a real same amount of time. They’ve always had similar infrastructure, but in 1977 when VS first established, that’s pretty good, right? The issue is that now it’s 2024 and not much has changed in terms of infrastructure, in terms of travel time, so it’s harder to accept. And now there are also, I think generally a higher number of delays due to traffic on the tracks with CN Rail, which is difficult.

Jordan: Let’s talk about how that happened because this was interesting to me. I didn’t know the via rail origin story and how it began, but then also how it began to fail. So take us through that if you can.

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to go back in time. It’s 1977 and the idea was to unify Canada’s passenger rail system to make it faster, more efficient, and a system that was all together and easy to navigate. And so the government of Canada bought up all of the trains and all of the passionate services from other companies like cn, but they did not buy the infrastructure that the trains run on. So what that means is suddenly Cano was in charge of almost all of the passenger rail systems, and that’s still true with the exception of small local trains or commuter lines like the Go train in Toronto. The government runs almost all of our passenger trains, but they don’t own any of the infrastructure. Most of that is still owned by cn, this massive freight train company. And because CN owns the trains, they have complete control over the schedule when passenger trains can run, and also they give their own trains priority. So if you’ve been on a V rail train and it’s been delayed, I mean it can be a number of things, but most often issues with delays are because there’s traffic. When we talk about train travel, sort of one of the benefits is there’s meant to be no traffic, but that’s not the way it works in Canada. If there’s a CN train that needs to go somewhere, we have to wait.

Jordan: How can freight trains be prioritized over trains with people on them? This isn’t a rhetorical question.

Gabrielle Drolet: It’s such a good question, and it’s just been that way for so long. This issue with freight trains has been acknowledged by Via since the 1980s v’s established in 1977. Within a few years in reports and annual reports, they’re saying, oh, the biggest issue is that trains are slow, and the way to make them less slow is to give them their own tracks, right? The reason it’s so slow is that we’re sharing tracks with freight trains. There are so many freight trains, they have complete priority, and because of that, we’re always delayed. And I think now the issue is that people are more fed up and trains are just not as competitive as other modes of transportation when not only are they expensive, but they’re also constantly delayed. Not only does it take, in theory five and a half hours for me to get from Montreal to Toronto, it might end up taking hours and hours more because there’s a freight train that needs to get somewhere and that’s more important.

Jordan: You touched on how bad it looks now, and one of the reasons is as we’ve discussed, is that short hop flight service has gotten more affordable and also more frequent, but also what are we comparing our trains to now and what we could have?

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah, I mean I think that’s what makes our trains look so bad is that now we’re comparing our trains to say trains in Europe and across Asia and across African countries where high-speed rail exists, right? Canada is the only G seven country without any form of high-speed rail. It’s not great in the United States either. They have not very widespread high-speed rail, but they have projects in particular high density areas. We don’t have anything like that in Canada and say high-speed rail could travel for, generally the minimum is 200 kilometers an hour. Our trains, I think the maps that they reach is 160 kilometers an hour. Usually they can’t even get up to that because there’s so much traffic. There are so many stops, there’s so much on the way. So it’s such a massive difference and high speed trains have been existing since the sixties. Now we have trains in other countries that are going up to 300 kilometers now or more than that, and our trains still go at the exact same speed with the exact same problems and the exact same delays. It’s just harder. It’s harder to put up with, especially given that even driving sometimes can be faster than taking the train.

Jordan: So why don’t we have high speed rail? We are a G seven country. We are not poor. Has it ever been proposed in Canada? Have there been any plans for it? What’s the status of it?

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah, it’s something that has sort of come up into conversation so often, but it’s never been considered very earnestly because it’s expensive. The problem is that having high-speed rail is extremely expensive to establish, but it’s the sort of thing that you pay for once and then you have it. What Canada has done instead is all of these band-aid solutions where simply building a separate set of tracks, it wouldn’t be high speed, but that could have solved our issues decades ago. Instead of doing that, Canada invested nicer flashier trains or better onboard services, but we’ve never invested in any sort of infrastructure high speed or not to make our trains better, not until recently, and that’s a whole other conversation, but yeah, HighSpeed Rail has never been earnest considered because it’s expensive and instead Canada has thrown all of these separate solutions that aren’t as effective and really are quite embarrassing in the grand scheme of things.

Jordan: Okay, so I mean, you said embarrassing. I didn’t. So speaking of embarrassing proposed solutions, tell me about Canada’s alternative to high speed rail that was, I think begun in 20 16, 20 17. What are we doing instead of high speed rail?

Gabrielle Drolet: See, I spent so long writing this article and just getting angrier and angrier as I did because it is embarrassing. So instead we have high frequency rail and high frequency rail. When you say it sounds like high speed rail, right? It sounds like, oh, that’s a similar thing, but it’s not. It’s a completely made up term. It only exists in Canada. It’s not a real thing. High frequency rail just means that we’re going to finally do what we should have done decades and decades and decades ago and build a separate track for via rail trains to run on. To be clear, this is only in the Quebec City to Windsor corridor. It’s where I think it’s around 80% of via rail ridership happens. It’s the most densely populated part of Canada. That’s where we’re building this and it’s just going to allow us to have more trains. But they’re not faster.

Jordan: The same trains,

Gabrielle Drolet: The same trains, exactly.

Jordan: Just on new tracks, but not tracks that have freight trains on them at least.

Gabrielle Drolet: Exactly. It is going to be good objectively at the step up in that we’re going to have far fewer of the delays that we currently have. Most of our delays are because of freight trains, but at this point it’s billions and billions of dollars. The project keeps getting delayed. It’s become this whole huge catastrophe, and it’s like at this point, why didn’t we just make high speed rail? Yeah, it’s an investment, but so is this, and in the long term, especially as other countries get faster and faster trains, why do our trains travel at the same speed they did in the seventies?

Jordan: It is frustrating, but at least it is progress, and that was progress that was announced seven years ago. So I mean, how are the new tracks coming along? Where are they?

Gabrielle Drolet: Excellent question, and it’s a question a lot of people have

Jordan: I led you into that one?

Gabrielle Drolet: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s the thing is so far they haven’t been coming. Construction hasn’t started yet, and we don’t really know when it will. Our transportation minister said that he would love to ski these new trains in operation by the mid 2030s, which is a while from now. That’s a decade from now.

Jordan: We’re going to be at net zero before we get new train tracks.

Gabrielle Drolet: Yes, yes, exactly. And again, he’s not saying the trains will be operational by the mid 2030s. He’s saying he would love to see that there’s no actual firm timeline on this, and there’s also no firm budget anymore. We’ve sort of gone past what the budget was supposed to be.

Jordan: Wait, we’re past what the budget was supposed to be, but there’s no track yet.

Gabrielle Drolet: Yes, we have spent billions of dollars more than what we’re supposed to, but now in interviews, the transportation has refused to say how much they expect the project to cost because it’s just, it keeps getting blown over.

Jordan: So in the meantime, are there any mitigation measures for the constant delays or do we just see a continuing exodus of people who prefer to pay to fly as bad as that is for our supposed environmental goals?

Gabrielle Drolet: For now, I think that’s the answer for now. The solutions are the same that they have been for years, which is that when you are on a train that is very delayed, you get a 50% off voucher for your next train trip, so long as it’s within six months and you keep putting up with free trains or you choose to fly, but there’s no immediate plan beyond that, which is very frustrating because the mid 2030s are a long way away from now, and in the meantime, that’s a decade during which people can keep getting fed up with the V rail, keep choosing to drive or to fly, do other more environmentally unsound things, and I don’t blame them because traveling via is one of the most frustrating experiences you can have and it’s expensive too.

Jordan: Last question then, and I know I’ve sarcastically laughed at some of this, and it is frustrating as somebody who does love the experience of taking the train. Put on your optimist hat for a second. It’s 10 years from now, we actually have gotten this project built. What does train travel look like then? How much better could it get?

Gabrielle Drolet: The idea is that if we were to have high frequency rail, there would be no freight train traffic and it would take say a few hours less to get from Montreal to Quebec. It’s not a huge difference, but it is a difference, right? And at the very least, you would know for sure if I’m meant to get between point A and point B in this amount of time, there’s much, much, much less chance that you will have delay.

Jordan: That’s positive.

Gabrielle Drolet: Absolutely. If and when this actually happens, it will be a positive step forward, just not the step forward that Canada could have taken if they actually chose to invest years ago in high-speed rail the way that most other countries

Jordan: Did. Gabrielle, thank you so much for this. It’s a great piece and as frustrating as it is, I’m glad to have some insight into why it’s that way.

Gabrielle Drolet: Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure to talk about

Jordan: Gabrielle Drolet writing in Maisonneuve Magazine. That was The Big Story for more, including other stories about Canada’s lacking transportation systems. We’ve covered a few of them. You can head to The Big Story podcast ca. You can also, of course, give us some feedback on this episode or any other. We always love to hear it. The email address is hello at The Big Story podcast ca, and the phone number where you can leave a message is 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. As I mentioned yesterday, we’d love to play some responses that we get, some voicemails that you leave us. In order for us to do that, you got to tell us that you’re okay with us using your message on the podcast because we won’t just take your voice and play it. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon is a producer on this show. Stefanie Phillips is our showrunner. Mark Angly handled the sound design. This week. Mary Jubran is our digital editor, and Diana Keay is our manager of business development. I am your host and executive producer, Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll talk Monday.