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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
It's also important to remember how the economics would be different under the new set up. Currently the corridor services use locomotive hauled consists which are very inefficient for short trains - especially the old locos they currently often use. I've seen VIA corridor trains with a loco pulling as few as two or three coaches. DMUs - or especially EMUs - would make low volume service much less costly, but even newer loco-hauled consists would have lower operating costs.
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First of all, VIA is in the process of replacing their entire corridor fleet with modern Siemens Charger locomotives and Venture coaches, so they will soon start seeing the lower operating costs you are suggesting.
Secondly, looking at a
VIA Corridor Cycling plan from 2018, VIA only had 1 trainset that operated with 2 coaches (HEP-7), which was used trains 85 & 88, and there were only two trainsets that only had 3 cars (LRC-12 & LRC-13), but both had an extra car added to them midway through the week (presumably to accommodate additional demand).
On the opposite end of the scale, there were 12 x 4-car trainsets (one which had a fifth car added), 12 x 5-car trainsets (one which had a 6th car added) and 2 x 6-car trainsets.
One of the big advantages of the new fleet is standardization of equipment, which will greatly reduce maintenance cost. Adding a few DMUs to the mix would work against this and would counter the operational savings, and reduce operational flexibility as certain trainsets become tied to certain routes.
For the remote services, they are so few and far between, to keep maintenance costs low, they would likely be best to match whatever is purchased to replace the long distance fleet (if anything).
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But Lakeshore electrification would likely only be considered if using Lakeshore as the mainline.
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Electrification of the Lakeshore could only happen with the permission of the host railway, something the freight railways have been extremely resistant to. The best opportunity for electrification would be for VIA to own the corridor it operates on, and that won't be the Lakeshore, unless it is a greenfield route.
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The other issue is that on routes where VIA mostly or entirely rents track slots from the private sector, each trip will have a higher fixed operating cost than for track that VIA owns. Both the HFR and HSR proposals involve VIA-owned trackage which affects the economics. So with HFR or HSR on the northern route, Lakeshore services could actually be less economic. There would be more passengers but each train movement would be a lot more expensive. We'd need to see the final numbers to know how that would actually play out.
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Are you suggesting that VIA gets a bulk discount from CN for operating so many trains on the Lakeshore? I would expect the opposite and each additional train is exponentially more expensive than the previous as it cuts further into CN's capacity, so removing the express trains, that don't do much to serve the Lakeshore anyway, will likely result in significant savings (especially when you consider the priority required by trains with a higher average speed, due to fewer stops, will also result in additional cost).