Have spent the the last 3 months attemping to get the attention of organisations that might find the north Okanagan rail assets a fit for their corperate mission such as Virgin and Xannterra with no luck. The regulatory door for line’s purchase shuts midnight Dec.7th. Doubt that rail service to Kelowna will last out the decade. Once the CPR’s line is dismanteled in will effectively kill any hope of developing an alturnative traffic base for the valley’s rail assets. Any doors out there that might open?
This was a done deal many years ago, just walk away from any former obligations, like "we will provide a passenger and freight service if you give us thousands of square miles of land" Maybe Kelowna should ask for some of it’s land back. Never could figure out why there was never a larger rail service in the Okanagan, it seemed a small forgotton way station.
Big question: is there any traffic on the OKAN north of Armstrong? How many carloads of gensing can they ship? Methinks all traffic goes west, via the KPR/KHR, especially the “BC Bud”, or is it all trucked ooot? Too bad! It is a very scenic line. Maybe 50,000 gallon wine cars can save it! There are, aktchu’lly, some Canadians that drink wine, east of BC, I think.
Geopolitically Canada originally streched longitudinally while the topography runs north and south. The Okanagan Valley was just skirted at its north end along the Shuswap Lake at Sicamous by the east-west transcontinental CPR main line. One of the orginal goals of the CPRs 19th century construction was to consolidtion british north american territories into one unified nation. There was no interest in building north-south infrastructure other than to feed the main rail arteries. Unfortuntitly rail in many cases has not been encouraged to adapt sucessfully to the changing ecomonic enviroment. For example British Columbia has an outragous property tax rate on rail assets which is basically a tax on commodities moved by rail.
Hard to say, the Kelowna Pacific still operates in the area, I don’t see the joint trackage going anywhere for a while.
Taxes? In B. C.??? That can’t be, other than the 13% sales tax, and…
When I look at how traffic coming out of Kelowna has declined over the last 20 years I tend to agree the line into Kelowna looks like its on its last legs. If the mill in Kelowna closed or reduced its shipments by rail any further I don’t see the line surviving. So the line has essentially become dependend on a single shipper for survival. Not a good situation.
I recall in the 1980s both CN and CP would each run 30+ car trains (including intermodal) out of Kelowna on weekdays. Its sad to see where it has ended up.
I don’t know much about the traffic into Enderby/Grinrod. Is it insufficient to interest KPR in extending their operation from Armstrong to Grinrod?