Quote:
Originally Posted by Joseph Potvin
Yup, we didn't expect the City of Ottawa to outright violate federal law and destroy the track connection. We didn't expect the Canadian Transportation Agency to dilly dally on the case for 7 years, which is almost visible from their office windows. We also expected the Government of Quebec (esp the Min of Transport, who at that time was from The Pontiac), to maintain the rail connection between the Pontiac and the urban core, and La Pêche and the urban core. And we thought the Quebec Minister of Justice (from Gatineau) would require CCFO compliance with Law 244. We were wrong every time we expected the public sector to take a whole region view.
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After seeing that comment, along with some of the posts over the past week, in particular from Charles5, I think I can finally make sense of Moose of the Moose saga, and why it has ended up in the spot that it is in today.
When Moose started, most of the lines he proposed using still had at least a minimum amount of use on them. Without digging too deep I am sure there were a few abandoned sections at the time, but overall, there was at least some activity which would have made it possible to just slap a commuter train on it and start a service on it. Yes, the service would have been painfully slow, but Moose at least had a small chance to work fast and get its system going, before people had too much time to think about the implications of it.
But there was a critical miscalculation.
For standard freight, which is now done in containers, the major operators have rationalized their operations so that they essentially only have to take it from port to intermodal rail terminals (and vice versa), which are located in only the largest centres. From these intermodal terminals, they can simply use trucks to take them too there final destination; branch and short lines are not necessary. And unlike the Prairies or BC, where branch lines serving small or remote areas are used to bring forestry products, potash, oil, grain, and some other natural resources to market, there is nothing like that in Southern Ontario or Southern Quebec, save the need to serve the odd industrial location.
Right at the time Moose was being conceived, and then revealed to the public, several of these lines were hitting the end of their usefulness. In reality, the short lines and branch lines that still remained in the NCR were living on borrowed time. That the lines would be abandoned was inevitable, but Moose failed to see that turn of events.
Once rail lines have stopped serving a purpose, they either get discontinued, sold, or just left in a general state of abandonment until it becomes to costly to even do that. And since the lines are privately owned, there are free to proceed with any one of those choices. The Moose plan required all the commuter lines up and operating simultaneously (or near as makes no difference), and for the lines to be owned and maintained by someone else. So as the infrastructure faded away, Moose needed a new strategy.
If there was already money available to start up Moose the answer would be simple, they just buy the lines themselves. But since there wasn’t even money for a feasibility study, they went with their now well known tactic; take legal action, and try to find any means of having the lines not ripped up.
As stated above, there became this weird notion that somehow, someway, local municipalities should step in and save the lines, and secure them for future use. But that was never going to happen. Municipalities cannot force private companies to keep the tracks in place if they don’t have any use for them. They would also have to purchase the lines themselves, if they wanted to save the tracks from being removed (I know that simply protecting the right of way is different, but Moose needed the tracks, not just the land).
Now, it is not uncommon for public agencies to purchase rail lines. GO has spent the last two decades making purchases to build up its network, and VIA is starting to ramp up its purchasing efforts. But municipalities are not going to purchase a line, maintain the track, just so that some private company might be able to use it in the future one day. Not to say that this model couldn’t work, but it would be a radical shift in how things are done today, and it would take an agency/government with considerable resources to pursue the idea). If a municipality, or collection of municipalities is going to purchase a line/right of way, it will be for their own use. And right now no one seems to be lining up to do that, probably because there is no value in those lines for passenger rail service (outside of perhaps VIA picking up a few, rather short sections, but that is speculative and another topic unto itself).
So instead of stopping, and doing a full rethink of the plan, when it became clear that 3 of lines were going to be abandoned (and would not be coming back), Moose simply played the defensive game and continued its strategy of legal games. A strategy, that as Charles5 pointed out, has involved trying to be clever and tailor arguments for each particular case, even if they are not consistent across the whole.
And as a final nail in the coffin you have the change in how people in Ottawa view LRT since the start of the 2010's. At that time there was just a pokey O-Train on the now Trillium line, and larger plans were still being sorted out as a strong vision of what it could do for, and mean to, the city, hadn't yet brought the majority of the public on board to the investments needed. Now, LRT is largely uncontroversial (save the odd neighborhood battle or line or station placement). People are behind it as a positive and healthy way forward for the city. This makes any battle for the Trillium corridor one in which the public will very swiftly react and voice their opinions about.
TL;DR, there will be no Moose. If there was ever a chance, even after the miscalculation, then Moose would have needed to hit pause some time ago, and retool the project to adjust for the reality that it would need to outright purchase and maintain 3 of the lines if it wanted to pursue its vision as is. Instead an already shaky idea just gets dragged along. It might fade away quietly. Or if an official end is announced, everyone else will be to blame.
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