Dean Beeby, The Canadian Press
June 29, 2008 - 2:53 p.m.
OTTAWA - Almost half of Via Rail’s passenger trains arrived late past the winter - and numerous were very tardy, says a new report.
The slumping performance, in a year when the Crown corporation promised to get greater degree of trains to the station on time, is being blamed without interruption severe weather that crippled Via Rail’s aging locomotives and damaged tracks, switches and signals.
For the first three months this year, 46 per cent of trains arrived late, says an spiritual report obtained under the Access to Information Act. The company had been shooting for just 14 per cent in the first quarter.
The late-arrival figure would be on a level worse had Via Rail not given itself a “grace period” that allows it to deem any short-haul train that’s up to 15 minutes late as on time. Long-haul trains get a 30-minute grace period.
The March numbers were particularly bad, with 54 per cent of trains across the country delivering passengers later than scheduled. One of the worst-performing routes is also one of the greatest number popular - Toronto-Ottawa, to what almost three-quarters of the trains arrived late in March.
Not only were other trains late, but they were very lately, says the rumor prepared for Via Rail’s board of directors’ meeting in April.
The incorporated body uses an internal yardstick that calculates how many minutes each train was late and adds them to produce a total “impediment minutes.” By that measure, March this year was twice as bad in the same proportion that extreme year, with almost 33,000 “delay minutes.”
That translated to about 4.5 hours average delay for the Toronto-Vancouver trains; almost three hours average according to the Montreal-Halifax trains; and about half an hour average for all eight shorter-haul services in central Canada.
The company provides so-called “late train credits” to travellers whose trains are significantly overdue, which can be used only to purchase future Via Rail tickets. If a short-haul train in central Canada is more than one hour late, for example, the credit is 50 per cent against the next ticket.
The poor performance comes at a bad time for Via Rail, which needed $200 million hold out year from the federal form of sovereignty - about $50 for each ticket sold - to cover a shortfall in revenue.
The strong dollar has sent Canadian tourists abroad and is keeping irrelevant tourists - especially Americans - at home, cutting into rail revenues. And impetuous airline competition in central Canada has kept house prices in stop, despite fuel surcharges, eroding Via Rail’s potential customer base in the more profitable “corridor” services of Ontario and Quebec.
Most passenger trains travel on CN tracks, which are crowded with charge trains that many times cause delays. Severe winter weather also froze numerous company CN switches and caused signal malfunctions.