When VIA finally became a separate Crown corporation in 1978, the deal included stations, routes, and trains. Crucially, the nation’s tracks remained under CN’s control, which meant that the Turbo — and all other passenger lines — had to defer to the freight carrier’s schedule, further adding to high-speed rail’s woes. In 1982, VIA finally pulled the underused Turbo from service. Its replacement, Bombardier’s conventional, diesel-electric powered LRC (“Light, Rapid, Comfortable”), had been designed to top out at 160 kilometres per hour.
In subsequent decades, passenger rail continued to languish. Even after CN was privatized in 1995, VIA had to pay to use the company’s tracks, its trains frequently forced to yield to freight cars. As a result, no passenger train in Canada has been capable of maintaining a schedule that can compete with air or even automotive travel.
In order to fully convey the unusual nature of this made-in-Ottawa relationship, perhaps an analogy is in order: Imagine how efficient automotive travel would be if the federal government owned and operated every passenger vehicle on the Trans-Canada Highway. Then suppose the government handed the Trans-Canada itself to a multinational trucking company, which subsequently decreed that passenger vehicles would have to pull off to the shoulder whenever a truck wished to pass.
As things stand, passenger trains must often come to a standstill on a siding not far from the site of the historic Turbo crash. Riders sit and watch as freight cars laden with everything imaginable — sometimes even meat — lumber past.
Since the Turbo’s demise, a parade of proposals to restore high-speed passenger rail to Canada have come forward. The restoration of rapid rail to the corridor between Quebec City and Windsor has been studied (or had a study initiated) at least sixteen times since 1973, most recently with a $3-million review launched in February of 2009, as part of a rapprochement between Quebec premier Jean Charest and Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty.
“What’s the point of another study?” asks Paul Langan. “It was viable in the 1980s. It was viable in 1995. Like all the previous studies, this one will come back and say, ‘Yes, we have the population to support it. Yes, people will ride it. Yes, it will pay for itself.’”
Langan, who lives just off Highway 401 in Cambridge, Ontario, and leads a citizens group called High Speed Rail Canada, says a Quebec City–Windsor line would pay for itself in three ways: First, even modest ridership projections indicate that passenger fares will cover operating costs, with enough left over to recoup the cost of building the railway within a few decades. Second, because the rail line would reduce congestion on the 401 and at airports, it would save millions of hours of passenger downtime, as well as sparing taxpayers the expense of further expanding highway and air infrastructure. And third, because high-speed trains use about one-third the energy of flying — and one-fifth that of driving — such a line would dramatically slash carbon use, just when caps and taxes designed to reduce carbon consumption start to take effect.
Despite his strong case for reviving high-speed rail along the Turbo’s old route, however, Langan points to Alberta as a more likely location for Canada’s first high-speed line of the twenty-first century. Interest in developing a TGV-type route between Calgary and Edmonton dates back to the ’70s. The Alberta government studied the idea in the mid-’80s and again in 1995, but concluded that ridership was insufficient. In 2004, however, a study conducted by the Van Horne Institute at the University of Calgary determined that a 300-kilometre line from Calgary to Edmonton would not only repay the system’s capital cost within thirty years, but would return as much as $6.1 billion in economic growth, provided the travel time was two hours or less.
A consortium called Alberta High-Speed Rail has emerged to back the new line. President Bill Cruickshanks, a former banker, insists that the VIA-CN relationship be reversed in Alberta. His company would own and operate the trains; the province would build and lease the tracks. “There should be a level playing field,” he says. “If you want to start an airline or a bus company, you don’t have to build an airport or a highway. We take the attitude that if government is going to build infrastructure for one industry, it should do so for the other.”
Upon receiving the 2004 study, the province of Alberta launched its own investigation to verify the report’s ridership projections. The province has yet to release the results of that study, which was completed in 2007. Complains Cruickshanks, “It’s been sitting on a shelf for more than a year and a half now.”
The Alberta delay is one of many examples of what rail historian Christopher Greenlaw calls Canada’s “insincere flirtation” with high-speed rail. While purporting to support these projects, provincial and federal governments have repeatedly
wound up stalling them. The pièce de résistance of flirtation was served by Prime Minister Chrétien, who, according to an interview with the late Jean Pelletier, left office with a deal sitting on the table that would have restored high-speed to the Ontario–Quebec corridor. Pelletier told La Presse that upon departing as Chrétien’s long-time chief of staff, he passed up senate and embassy postings to become chairman of VIA Rail. Chrétien was set to approve a $3-billion high-speed rail plan, according to Pelletier, but left office before doing so. Said Pelletier, “I came within a hair of having it.”
The Turbo was a gambit to revive interest in passenger rail in an era when policy wonks were questioning whether passenger rail was economically viable, and when ordinary Canadians were infatuated with airplanes and automobiles. Forty years later, the experts are seeing signs that air and auto travel are no longer sustainable, but Canadians have yet to fall back in love with passenger rail.
How could they? There’s nothing here to love. The Turbo has been all but erased from Canadian history. Railway museums have preserved hundreds of icons of Canadian rail legend, but not the Turbo. “They were all demolished. There are none left,” Langan says. Likewise, the legendary Montreal Locomotive Works, which built the TurboTrain, was reduced to a mountain of rubble in 2004.
Yet the vision that founded this nation still inspires: running over dedicated tracks, a TGV-type train could roll into Vancouver less than twenty-four hours after leaving Halifax. “We’re missing a John A. Macdonald, a visionary who could work through the problems,” Langan says. “Our recent governments don’t have vision. They’re only worried about getting a majority in the next government. And they appear structurally unable to consider the needs of the nation ten or twenty years from now.”
There are a few positive signs. First, the call for major stimulus projects persists: David Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada, recently told the Globe and Mail that now would be a good time to start making long-term infrastructure investments — ones with what he called “a tail” to them. In addition, an all-party committee is advocating that the federal government proceed with a link for the Central provinces; the contract to study the Quebec City–Windsor line was finally awarded in February of this year. And Alberta, though its economy is slumping, is sitting on one of the best fiscal situations in the world, and faces a pressing need to diversify its economy for the twenty-first century.
