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Originally Posted by acottawa
You're misunderstanding the order of operations here.
If Ottawa wants to discontinue part of the line the line (presumably everything North of the station)
It files the appropriate notification.
Another railway or municipality has the option to buy the line (based on a specific formula for cost).
If another railway or municipality doesn't want the line, remaining tracks are pulled up for scrap (after the necessary procedures).
Since capital railways is no longer an inter-provincial railways, it can get a provincial license and no longer be under the jurisdiction of the CTA.
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Ya, not so fast.
The Trillium Line crosses two other federally-regulated railways at grade. That keeps it under federal regulation.
A couple of years back when the City came out with its latest "let's spend way more money on the Trillium Line than any sane railway entity would" expansion proposal, it included a couple of high-priced grade separations at those railway crossings. At the time, I thought this was just more pointless unnecessary spending. I maintain that it is still unnecessary, but perhaps not pointless: the grade separations will mean that the Trillium Line will no longer directly interface with a federal railway.
So... had the City had not been so stupid as to design Bayview Station with a support pillar coming down on the old RoW and thus opening themselves to a challenge at the CTA by MOOSE, in a few years hence they could have been in a position to proceed with a "discontinuance" of the entire line from the Quebec shore to Bowesville Road and the Airport. There's virtually no way in Hell that MOOSE could finance an acquisition of all that with all those brand spanking new grade separations that would legitimately become part of any acquisition. The City would then be able to "buy" the line from itself and get itself out of the federal regulations that it, in its Provincial mentality, seems to despise so much.
The ironies are just layered on top of one another here, of course. For the cost of any one of these unnecessary grade separations further south, the City could readily refurbish the PoW Bridge anyway. The City currently runs 15 buses of route #105 per hour at peak into downtown Gatineau, and had a massive transfer concourse built at Pimisi Station for that purpose once the Confederation Line opens. 15 full buses per hour is no small amount of passenger traffic; it's in the kind of capacity range of the 8 min Trillium Line
I personally find the City's obsession with "freeing" itself from federal regulations distasteful for a capital city that ought to have something more than a provincial mindset. It's also kind of stupid as it has advantages as well. For a line into Gatineau, it would give the City the upper hand when it comes to creating the line itself and stations in Gatineau. Need a grade crossing at Rue Eddy? That can be done even if Gatineau doesn't want to cooperate. Gatineau not willing to cooperate on stations? Well... that's what federal powers of expropriation are for, be it from private landowners or the City of Gatineau itself.
The federally-regulated status of the Prescott Sub south of Hunt Club to Leitrim Road past the airport also protects that bit of track from being seized by the Airport: if the Airport wants to lengthen a runway, it would have to realign or grade separate the track, neither of which it wants to do, of course... which is why they wanted the line diverted (at City expense) into the Airport grounds rather than continuing on to Riverside South. A provincial line would be vulnerable to just being expropriated outright, like the roads are.
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At no point does it have to repair the bridge under federal or provincial law.
This isn't rocket science, railways are abandoned all of the time.
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Ah, but if MOOSE was to acquire the Bridge through a discontinuance, then the City would have to turn it over in a decent state. But the Bridge itself wasn't actually the primary source of MOOSE's complaint: it's that aforementioned support pillar at Bayview Station and the blockage of the original RoW with fill and a path and suchlike. The track locations at the new station don't have enough vertical clearance for a mainline railway, so from a legal perspective they can't be used as a stand-in for the mainline even if reconnected on the north side. The old Bayview spur got an exemption *because it was a spur* while the mainline was unaffected. But now the mainline has been blocked by permanent construction, which is essentially illegal. The City could theoretically get around it if they discontinued the segment from the Bayview switch northwards AND IF no one else came along and bought it. But of course there's MOOSE and buying a short bit of track might well be within their financial abilities (and the bridge will be assigned no value at all since it requires refurbishment). If so, the City would be on the hook for altering Bayview Station or providing a bypass (say through the back of Tom Brown Arena and under Scott and the Confederation Line).
This situation is entirely the City's own fault: all it had to do was not build on top of the old mainline. That's it. It's a spectacularly stupid own goal.
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