Throughout 2023, many Canadian commuter rail lines saw modest increases in service, bringing many back to pre-pandemic service levels. One line is now far exceeding its pre-pandemic service.
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The loss of London’s GO train
October 2023 marked the end of the two-year “pilot” of GO train service to London, which extended a single weekday Kitchener Line round trip beyond Kitchener. Because the service was introduced without any infrastructure investment, it was too slow and infrequent to be at all useful and therefore failed to attract any significant ridership.
In the 2022 provincial election, the Progressive Conservative party promised $160 Million in railway upgrades between London and Kitchener to make the service actually practical. The party was elected, now holding a majority of the seats in the Legislature, but they seem to have forgotten about this promise.
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How fast is Brightline?
On the 22nd of September 2023, the American passenger railway company Brightline opened a service extension from West Palm Beach to Orlando, completing their line from Miami to Orlando. This service, which is the first new privately-owned intercity service in the United States in decades, is often described as “high speed rail” in the media. But the validity of that claim is debatable.
A common definition of high speed rail is a simple threshold of 200 km/h. Brightline does reach 125 mph (201 km/h), so by that definition it does qualify. However, there is a considerable distinction between Brightline’s Florida line, which primarily uses existing at-grade railways, and a true high-speed service such as the under-construction California High Speed Rail system, which will operate mostly on brand new 220 mph (355 km/h) grade-separated railways.
In practice, Brightline’s service is more similar to a conventional intercity service than a dedicated high speed rail service, though it is faster than most other conventional services in North America. This middle ground is often referred to as “higher-speed rail” in the United States.
Brightline is particularly of interest for us in Canada because its current operations are very similar to the proposed operations under Via Rail’s High Frequency Rail proposal. It has hourly service which primarily uses existing which were railways upgraded to permit speeds of up to 110 mph (177 km/h), as well as a small amount of new 125 mph (201 km/h) railway to fill gaps. It even uses the same Siemens Charger locomotives and Siemens Venture coaches as Via!
To understand how Brightline’s new Florida line compares to other intercity train services in North America, I collected some statistics about its operations.
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CN Kingston Subdivision Track Map
The Canadian National Kingston Subdivision is the main railway line from Toronto to Montréal. To get a better understanding of the track layout, I made a track map based on satellite imagery.
Since the lockdowns have ended, ridership has been steadily returning to Canadian commuter rail lines. But the service levels have not kept pace.
At the start of January 2022, train schedules were nearly at their pre-pandemic levels, but in practice service was much lower due to chronic operator shortages. In Ontario, many trips were cancelled on a regular basis because there wasn’t anyone to operate them. So on the 10th of January, GO implemented drastic service cuts to schedule a service they could actually operate.
The service cuts were nearly as severe as the original service cuts from March 2020. Peak-period service was reduced to half-hourly on the Milton, Kitchener, Stouffville and Barrie lines, and to hourly on the Richmond Hill line. Weekend train service on the Barrie and Stouffville lines was cancelled altogether and replaced with buses. All express trains (on the Kitchener and Lakeshore West lines) were cancelled. And counter-peak service was also cancelled on the Kitchener line. On the Lakeshore lines, off-peak service was cut to half-hourly in the midday, and hourly on evenings and weekends.
At the time, I expected service would start returning to normal within a few months when the wave of operator illnesses passed. But service returned much slower than expected.
In April, half-hourly evening and weekend service was restored on the Lakeshore lines, and weekend service was restored on the Barrie and Stouffville lines.
At the end of the summer tourist season, the number of round trips to Niagara Falls was reduced from 3 to 2, which is a far cry from the 4 round trips which were provided year-round prior to the pandemic.
It wasn’t until December that weekday schedules started to return to normal, with peak period express services restored, and local trains added to increase frequency during the peak hour.
This year’s charts compare the January 2023 service to the service scheduled from in December 2021, just prior to the drastic cuts of January 2022.
Frequency
Although service levels have almost returned to normal, there are still some notable deficiencies compared to the Fall 2021 schedule.
The only frequency improvement this year is that 15-minute service was restored on the UP Express, though only during the peak periods. This still falls short of the all-day 15-minute service prior to the pandemic.
On the Lakeshore lines, midday service continues to be every 30 minutes, instead of every 15 minutes. Evening service on the Lakeshore West line is also limited to every 60 minutes due to construction on the Hurontario LRT at Port Credit Station.
The Kitchener line finally regained some counter-peak service to Bramalea in December, but there are still some 90 minute gaps in service.
Peak period frequencies on the Barrie, Milton and Richmond Hill line are also lower than normal. Hopefully additional trips will be continue to be added as new operators begin service.
There were no changes in frequency outside of Ontario.
Speed
With increased ridership come longer dwell times at stations. As a result, many lines had one or two minutes added to their schedules.
But not the Kitchener line. Thanks to Metrolinx’s railway upgrade project between Kitchener and Guelph, this year’s Kitchener express train is the fastest it’s ever been. In fact, with an average speed of 65 km/h end-to-end, it is the fastest Canadian commuter service ever included in these annual summaries.
While Metrolinx has been upgrading the Toronto-Kitchener railway, CN has allowed the the Kitchener-London railway to continue to deteriorate. Nearly the entire line is affected by speed restrictions due to track quality issues. Only a few segments between Kitchener and Stratford allow trains to reach the 60 mph (96 km/h) line speed, which itself is already lower than the 70 mph (112 km/h) speed limit which was in place until 1996. Trains now take a whopping 2h15 to cover just 90 km from Kitchener to London. In 1978 that trip took only 1h13, stopping at the same two stations along the way.
The Mascouche Line somehow managed to get even slower, now taking nearly two hours to get from Mascouche to Montreal, which according to Google Maps is only 15 minutes faster than riding a bicycle. Next year travel times should improve as trains will terminate at the new Côte-de-Liesse REM station where people can transfer to REM line which has taken over the former route of the Mascouche Line through the tunnel Mont-Royal.
Following the annus horibilis that was 2020, I am pleased to report that commuter rail service in Canada is showing a promising rate of recovery.
The service scheduled at the beginning of January 2022 is better in every way than the schedules one year prior, with the sole exception of the Stouffville line, whose last train on weekend evenings has now been replaced by a bus trip.
Off-peak service on most lines has returned to pre-pandemic levels, though peak-period service frequencies continue to be a bit lower due to the lower commuter ridership.
In the 2021 budget of the Government of Canada, there is an item named “Next Step towards High Frequency Rail in the Toronto – Quebec City Corridor, with a budget of $491 million over 6 years.
This is in itself a concerning development, since the HFR project proposed by VIA Rail requires at least $4 billion. The 6 year timeline is also suspiciously long for a “next step”, which could be a sign of the government rejecting the proposal while trying to avoid admitting that they have done so.
On the bright side, at least there is $491 million allocated for railway upgrades. Now the question is what that money will actually be used for. Two good candidates for investment would be the railway lines already owned by VIA that are included as part of the proposed HFR route: the Smiths Falls subdivision between Smiths Falls and Ottawa, and the Alexandria subdivision between Ottawa and Les Coteaux, QC (just west of greater Montréal).
Here are some cost-effective upgrades that would be possible along the Smiths Falls and Alexandria subdivisions:
2020 was a horrible year for mass transport in general, and Canadian commuter rail systems were hit particularly hard.
Vehicle Actuation is a simple mechanism which is remakably effective at determining the “right” duration for a traffic signal phase. It repeatedly checks the activity on one or more vehicle detectors to determine when the traffic flow rate in a lane has dropped below a certain threshold and the green should therefore end.
This is not to be confused with Traffic Adaptation, which is a much more complex system which does active calculations based on aggregated traffic information to determine the optimal green durations based on metrics such as vehicle delay and number of stops.
While Traffic Adaptative systems are commonly labeled as “smart” signals in the media, many of the actions that road users may commonly associate with smart signals are actually the result of actuation, not adaptation. These can include varying the combination of phases based on the users present, providing tailored green waves for groups of approaching vehicles, and ending the green at precisely the right moment when a queue has cleared.
ERRATUM: Some of the assumptions made in the below article have been subsequently proven to be poor. The speed of trains through curves can actually be somewhat faster than I assumed. This results in a theoretical minimum travel time roughly 30 minutes shorter than reported here in the “Only Upgrade” scenario. For more details, see the related discussion on the UrbanToronto Forum.
For the last few years, VIA Rail has been proposing to implement “High Frequency Rail”, which effectively amounts to upgrading infrastructure to increase capacity for passenger trains, and reduce conflicts with freight trains. Trains’ maximum service speed would be 110 mph (177 km/h), roughly the same as current VIA service. This is in contrast to previous unsuccessful proposals, which proposed to implement “High Speed Rail”, which would have had 300 km/h trains on a high speed line. The fundamental advantage of the new proposal is a vastly lower construction cost, since it can make use of existing railway rights-of-way and can have level crossings.
The backbone of the proposal is a new mainline from Toronto to Ottawa that VIA would own itself. The concept is to purchase CP Havelock Subdivision, which is currently very lightly used from Toronto to Havelock, and completely abandoned from Havelock to Perth where it rejoins the existing CP mainline.
VIA claims that because the line is largely existing, it can be upgraded and rebuilt for a cost of a few billion dollars (the exact number has varied and nothing is currently stated on the website). And according to the website, it will reduce the travel time from 4h30 to 3h15:
But there are a number of problems with this travel time claim. First of all, the current travel time is not 4h30. Trains are scheduled to run the line as quickly as 4h07, and in 2014 they ran services as quickly as 3h48:
But my bigger concern is with their estimate of 3h15 with HFR. In order to cover the 397-km Havelock route in 3h15, trains would need to average 122 km/h. This is on par with some existing VIA rail express services, but given some of the physical constraints along the Havelock route, it seems rather optimistic.
Ontario Traffic Man 