VIA Rail’s The Ocean will continue to stop in Sackville when it resumes its bare bones service on August 11, but a public transportation advocate says its unlikely the station will ever be reopened to waiting passengers, unless the community takes it over.
Keeping stations open is a “high cost operation” for VIA, says Transport Action Atlantic’s Ted Bartlett, “that’s why they discontinued it.”
Bartlett says the community takeover of passenger stations abandoned by VIA has happened elsewhere in Canada, including Amherst and Rogersville. “It’s a very widespread solution in the US,” says Bartlett, “where Amtrak has literally hundreds and hundreds of stations that they do not staff, but are maintained by the community.”
In Amherst, VIA turned over its closed station to the town of Amherst, who in turn signed a lease-to-own agreement with a local restauranteur. In Rogersville, the village has owned and maintained the station for many years, says Bartlett. “They ensure that the waiting room and washrooms are open at train time, and they use the rest of the building for their own purposes,” he says. “It’s a visitor information centre in the summer, and they’ve actually leased out some office space.”
VIA Rail announced last week that The Ocean will resume its round trip between Halifax and Montreal once a week. The train will take passengers westward from Halifax on Wednesdays starting on August 11, and return from Montreal on Sundays starting on August 15.
Before it was shut down due to the pandemic on March 13, 2020, the Ocean ran three weekly round trips between Halifax and Montreal. Before 2012, the service ran six round trips per week. Earlier in its history, the service ran multiple times per day.
“It’s an encouraging sign,” says Bartlett of the return to service, but it’s going to be a “long road back”.
Hear Ted Bartlett on Tantramar Report:
VIA will have strict measures in place on board the train, with masks required except when eating and drinking, and people asked not to leave their seats or cabins. “There’s no socializing, no moving around, which is all part of the passenger rail experience,” says Bartlett.
In addition to discomfort from pandemic restrictions, there will also be changes to the trains themselves that pose challenges, says Bartlett. The Ocean used to rely on a train loop in Halifax in order to turn around, but that loop sits on Crown land leased to PSA Halifax. And in 2020, the global shipping giant kicked VIA out.
Bartlett says the optimal solution to that problem, and many others, would be to replace the cars being used for The Ocean. That rolling stock is at the end of its working life anyway, says Bartlett, and was never well suited to the Canadian climate.
But instead of replacing its Maritime rolling stock, VIA has opted to mix the current cars with older cars to come up with a train that can run both directions without turning around. It means seats in some cars will be facing the wrong way for one leg of the Ocean’s roundtrip, and it also means the end of the popular dome/bubble/observation car (which had already been limited to sleeper class passengers.)
Those changes compromise the Ocean’s viability as a tourism product, says Bartlett. And the tourist market has been the main focus for the Ocean, especially since the reduction in service (to three trips per week, pre-COVID) relegated the service to nearly useless as a basic transportation option.
“In order for it to really meet the needs of the traveling public in Atlantic Canada, it needs it needs to be a daily service,” say Bartlett.
The replacement of rolling stock, along with the rehabilitation of deteriorated northern New Brunswick tracks (which reduce passenger train speeds to 30 km/hr in some places) would cost the federal government somewhere in the neighbourhood of $300 million, says Bartlett.
That’s a fraction of what the federal government has promised to spend on the busy Windsor-Quebec rail corridor, which reopened for service nearly a year before The Ocean, in September 2020.
“To put it in perspective, the public investment required here would be about the same as what it would cost to build 30 kilometres of divided highway,” says Bartlett. “It’s not a big ticket item. But again, the political will has to be there to do it.”
In the midst of a climate crisis, and a federal infrastructure boom, one might expect rail investment to be more popular in Canada. “We’re seeing it as close as the US, which hasn’t exactly been a world leader in investment in passenger rail,” says Bartlett. “Amtrak is in expansion mode. We don’t see any sign that VIA is in any kind of expansion mode outside the [Windsor-Quebec] corridor. Granted, they have to start somewhere, and I guess the place that generates the vast majority of their passenger revenues is a good place to start.”
But Bartlett sees a case for more modest investment outside of dense central Canada. “It doesn’t have to be the really expensive stuff that is only justified in high population corridors,” says Bartlett. “Here in Atlantic Canada, a more modest investment would satisfy the need. As long as the track is fixed, the equipment is new and reliable, and the schedule is frequent enough that it meets the public’s need.”
Although some government MPs are “quietly advocating” for broader investment, says Bartlett, “they’re somewhat muzzled by party discipline, and there’s no apparent political will at the cabinet level to do anything about the rail passenger needs of Atlantic Canada.”
“We like to keep reminding both VIA management, but more importantly, the government of Canada, that Canada does not end at Quebec City,” says Bartlett. “And we have a right to expect a reasonable amount of passenger rail service, and the bare minimum should be a daily train operating on a decent schedule with modern equipment.”
