@noel.semple7 I miss my train commute 😢. Should the government fix the existing train problems before spending big on high-speed?
♬ original sound – Noel Semple
Transcript: Standing behind me is an old friend who’s not part of my life anymore, which is sad. I’m in Windsor, Ontario, where I’ve taught law for the past 12 years now at the University of Windsor. I live 350 km away in Etobicoke.
For the first decade of my job here, I took Via Rail train 73 train once a week during the university term.
And it was great. It was scheduled to arrive here at 3:45, and my civil procedure class started on Tuesdays at 4:30.
So I had a folding bike that I was able to get out here, unfold the bike, and get across Windsor for my class. It was a great commute, and it looked like it was about to get better in 2024 when Via started rolling out these new “Venture” trains that it bought.
Prior to these trains the ones we rode on were built actually in the 1950s. The new ones are a lot more comfortable in a lot of ways and very attractively, they have bicycle storage. So I thought I’d be able to start riding a full size bike instead of a foldie, which would have made my commute even better.
And it looked like it was gonna be terrific until October of ‘24. In October of 2024, these trains started becoming consistently 15 to 45 minutes late. The train today (Thursday May 7) was over a half an hour late, arriving in Windsor.
And that wasn’t enough time for me to get to my class and I can’t be late.
So I’ve been driving my car here from Etobicoke, during the university term, since late 2024.
So what happened in October 2024? Well, to understand that we’ve go to back up and realize that VIA rail is a passenger train company, it’s a federal Crown corporation but it does not own most of the railway tracks on which its trains run.
Most of its tracks are owned by CN rail, which is a privately held corporation, and CN as the track owner has the right to regulate the trains that run on it. In 2024 CN decided that these new Via Rail trains are too light to consistently trigger the level crossing safety arms.
If you’re driving across a train track you’ll see the arm go down and the lights light up and the bells start ringing. So CN is basically saying these trains are too light to make that happen. They’ve issued an order saying that via has to slow these trains down to about 70 or 80 kilometres down from 150 or 160 km, every time they go across a level crossing between Windsor and Quebec City, which means the trains are always late.
Via disputes this they say that there’s no problem and the trains trigger the level crossings just fine and they can’t figure it out. They are in Court they are litigating in the Quebec Superior Court and also in the Federal Court.
Eighteen months in, there is no end in sight. They’re deep into documentary discovery and it looks like, hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions will be spent on lawyers, and then eventually a resolution to this dispute will come out of the court.
But in the meantime, everyone who relies on this train to get somewhere by a particular time, like if you’re commuting to a job, is pretty much out of luck.
I don’t enjoy the drive, and I feel a little bit guilty about the carbon emissions, but I’m also actually saving a lot of money by driving. It’s quite astonishing that the price to take this train from Toronto to Windsor and back
it was about $210, which is almost twice as much as it costs in gas to drive here [and back]. So I buy the carbon offset so I don’t feel so guilty and I save money, which is really weird that the public transit option ends up costing so much more than just driving a car by yourself down all that highway.
I think there’s some lessons here for the federal government, which is now talking about a huge new high speed rail project. And that might be a great project, but I think the devil’s in the details and in particular, it’s crucially important that this new rail project, do better than Via rail is doing right now. That is a matter of having a train which sticks to its schedule and is also affordable for people.
The big idea in Canadian politics right now is “build, baby, build,” build more stuff, build more infrastructure and that’s great, but we’ve got to make sure the stuff we build actually works once we get it built.
And more specifically, when it comes to this dispute between Via rail and CN which is making this train and all the other Via trains on the corridor late, I think the federal government needs to be a little bit more hands-on.
I don’t think this is the sort of thing we can just leave to these corporations to sort out through litigation cause it’s gonna take years and cost millions. I think the federal government needs to get its hands dirty and work on getting this into arbitration or mediation.
They’ve got a certain amount of leverage over both Via and CN but if we’re gonna have a public sector which spends taxpayers money we’ve got to take accountability and responsibility for making sure it works.
I think this is a great opportunity for the federal government to show that it’s willing to do that, which will in turn build public support for the high speed rail project and you know, maybe get me off the road and back onto the rails where I want to be.