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Originally Posted by lrt's friend
I think the fight to save the rail line is pointless. The reason why CN and CP have wanted to lift rail lines in the Ottawa valley is because there are simply no customers left. If rail service was so important then why aren't companies using it?
I realize that this may compromise the future in some respects but no business can continue with zero customers.
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Nice rant. Except there aren't zero customers. There were quite a few in and around Pembroke and others in Portage-du-Fort, plus the old mine at Bristol that supplies aggregate. Indeed it's for the businesses in the Portage-du-Fort business park that MRC Pontiac is desperately trying to save the line; without that line current businesses may close, others won't expand and some of the closed factories will never reopen.
Ottawa Central was a profitable operation until the day it was taken over by CN, and it was taken over by CN solely because Ottawa Central's parent company refused to sell some of its other assets without selling them all. What CN actually wanted was some track elsewhere in Quebec, which, ironically enough, it had already disposed of in the 1990s - that's how short-sighted CN can be.
As for the CP line, it's long been known amongst industry in the valey that CP was very unresponsive to both existing and would-be customers. I happen to know that some even tried to get CP's attention by going through their MP, to no avail.
CN and CP have a habit of deliberately destroying their customer bases along lesser lines; for them it's not just enough for a line to be profitable, it has to be profitable enough to pull up their operating ratios.
Instead, both companies want to salvage the rails to lay them elsewhere on their networks, particularly out west to serve the currently booming oil-by-train bonanza. When that's spent in 5-10 years once the various pipelines get built, they'll probably tear those tracks back up and scrap them.
If it hadn't been for CN buying Ottawa Central, OCR probably would have bought the CP line itself as it would have nicely added to Ottawa Central's business by giving them access to all of Renfrew County. In that case there wouldn't be the opportunity for ignorant, ill-informed ranting about zero customers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
Why? The city was proactive in purchasing the Prince of Wales Bridge and in the long run, they will be stuck with a large bill to repair the bridge, with little possibility of creating much more than a bicycle path across it for the foreseeable future. And this is in the heart of the city.
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Just because the City of Ottawa's transit and transportation planning department is run by bus-nuts should not be used to discount the wisdom of buying that bridge. The O-Train could easily have been extended to Terrasses de la Chaudière and Place du Portage a decade ago, and in so doing could virtually have eliminated the high cost shuttle bus run over the Chaudière Bridge. How many millions have been wasted by OC Transpo by their dogmatic refusal to do anything about that costly shuttle bus run? Instead they've given us the perpetual excuse of waiting for the results of some ethereal interprovincial study that none of the agencies ever seemed to want to initiate.
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Buying a rail line outside the city in a economically depressed rural area with stagnant population does not seem to be a winning proposition even in the long term.
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Well we would have ready access to a source of granite ballast for our LRT project. But hey, let's just truck it all in or use lesser quality limestone ballast or import it from afar.
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