Quote:
Originally Posted by roger1818
That decision was made by the un-elected Jacques Gréber of the NCC who seemed to have a hatred for trains and instead thought that Ottawa would be much more beautiful if it was completely paved. I am not sure if the city or regional governments agreed or not, but NCC decisions overrule policies of elected officials, so it doesn't matter (which explains the disdain many from Ottawa have towards the NCC).
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While in retrospect the decisions back then around rail now seem very short-sighted, at the time the City was also staring down huge costs in maintaining its aging streetcar fleet. Combine that with declining passenger rail demand and it looks like it was pretty easy for Greber to convince everyone to greatly reduce rail. No more stinky train yards, no more kids getting maimed / killed when playing along the right-of-ways, no more 'unsightly' overhead streetcar power lines, etc.
My parents lived in Ottawa in the early 1950's, and my dad used to walk to work and had to cross the old Canada-Atlantic rail line (now the Queensway route). He said the problem back then was that the plethora of railway lines, some of which were put in place before Ottawa had outgrown its Bytown roots, really plugged up commuter traffic. (See:
https://churcher.crcml.org/Map/ottawamap.html) A freight train along the Canada-Atlantic had to of course reduce speed as it proceeded through an urban area, so it slowly chugged along while everyone sat in the cars and waited (though there were 'subways' at Bank, Preston and Elgin to mitigate this somewhat). Note too that while the old CP line that became the Trillium line was kept, it was trenched, along with the old Scott St. CP route when it was converted to busway, just to minimize road congestion. (Which now handily allows us to not have to trench that route as it gets converted back to rail.)
I would really like to see the Prince of Wales Bridge used for rail, as well as for ped. / cycle. I sometimes cycle the bike path on the Quebec side out to the Aylmer Marina, and the adjacent old rail right-of-way seems to mostly be intact. And the bike path actually uses it for the last it before the marina. Back X amount of years ago there was much noise on the Ottawa side when it was proposed to expand the Champlain Bridge. The expansion seemed to be mainly for the benefit of Quebec commuters, and I always thought "but there's an old rail line that could be used for those folks going right through their community...".
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