Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
There are some places where trains could make a difference outside of "Central Canada". These are routes that already have decent track conditions for freight operators. You'd have to negotiate with the likes of CP - which is like pulling teeth - but you could probably get at least 3 trains between Calgary and Banff in the summer (somebody already mentioned this). A semi-frequent train (like 4X a day/direction) from Moncton to Halifax is also low-hanging fruit.
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It seems like the structure of how the railways in Canada are managed and the services are operated is completely messed up.
The actual right of ways themselves, the natural monopoly, should be publicly controlled and preserved even if they don't seem useful today (i.e. it's okay to let track fall apart, but the government will not sell off portions of the land or lease it for some other purpose). The development and maintenance of the rail lines themselves should not be subject to tax, i.e. there should be no tax incentive to tearing up old rail lines.
The services that run on the railways should be private. There should be some kind of schedule bidding process that expires every so often (5 or 10 years), and there should be penalties for operators that don't stick to their schedule. This should all be transparent.
Under this system if you wanted to start up a passenger rail service between two cities or commuter rail within a metro area you'd bid for a schedule. Also, the freight operators would have an incentive to ship more stuff during the cheap times. As it is right now we basically have a couple of regional rail monopolies that see themselves as freight operators, plus a passenger rail operator that has to work around them while also being subject to a bunch of arbitrary government stipulations about what places need to be served (e.g. the MP for the St-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha! region lobbied for this in 1982 so now we have to provide this service until the end of time).