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Originally Posted by sonysnob
The railway era is over in North America. The railway industry has been in decline for the past century, and hundreds if not thousands of kilometres of railways have been removed across the province. This will not be the last mainline to be abandoned, though this one is higher profile than most as there aren't any nearby railways to pick up the slack.
Few industries require rail service to move their product. These industries generally include chemical or petroleum refineries, or bulk materials such as coal or ore. I am not an expert on the area, but I don't think there are any large scale refineries or mines in the upper Ottawa Valley that would require such a rail line. None of the communities in the Upper Ottawa Valley are large enough to make passenger service economical.
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Obviously you missed the bit where the predecessor Ottawa Central Railway was profitable until it was bought [back] by CN, and they only did that because what they really wanted was a rail ferry in Quebec (which in their shortsightedness had also sold off in the 90s) and the common parent company wouldn't break up its assets for sale.
The Ottawa Valley still produces a fair bit of wood-related product. Pembroke is basically finished now in terms of future manufacturing in that sector, while the industrial park in Portage-du-Fort is at risk of being shuttered if the line is removed by CN.
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This isn't even the first transcontinental railway to be abandoned. The Northern Route was severed west of Calstock decades ago. More recently, the connection between CN's mainline north of Lake Nipigon and CP's Shoreline route via the Nipigon River was removed.
I lament the loss of CP's historic mainline given its history, but railways are a dying breed, and government intervention to save a rural railway without a customer base to support a short-line is a waste of money.
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How about we subsidize railways for half a century while making highways pay property tax and then see how things work out for highways? At least forcing highway to pay property tax would probably be the end of those idiotic A4 parclos the MoTO so loves. It's absurd that railway RoWs are taxed as if they were regular property... nuttier still that once the rails are lifted the tax payable drops. I'm afraid that a lot of railway abandonment in Canada is actually property tax related rather than "railways being a dying breed".
Again, why can't the government just buy the railway infrastructure for the future? Where does this idea come from that it has to "support" a short line? The government seems to have no compunctions about subsidizing highway construction and maintenance, while it doesn't "support" in most other ways trucking companies. In most other countries railways - the physical infrastructure on the ground - is a state asset like highways (and canals too in much of Europe). What and who operates on those varies considerably, but the infrastructure itself remains a state asset.
And in the case of the Ottawa Valley lines, we've got a major military base located along it. The military's options for moving lots of heavy equipment in a hurry has been drastically reduced by the combined abandonments of the CP Chalk River and CN Beachburg subdivisions. Secondarily is also the nuclear facilities at Chalk River; at some point nuclear waste may have to be shipped from or to those facilities and now it will have to be done by truck rather than the far safer rail option. Those two lines were strategic national assets - and both gone within a couple of years.
As for wasting money, the MoTO does that all the time. Virtually every A4 parclo is a waste of money (and land, and therefore property tax potential) compared to the alternatives. The insistence on full freeways with costly overpasses, interchanges and extra miles of service roads rather than simple divided highways wastes plenty of money. The oversized Hwy 417 to Kanata is definitely a waste of money that could easily have bought the CN Beachburg sub to Pembroke.
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. Here are some shots I took of that section.
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