I finally received my June Trains Magazine. There is a little blurb about CP and Rail America donating the line to the Island Corridor Foundation. which plans to begin passenger service. The article says the line is 159 miles long, and worth C$236 million. Anybody local that fill us in on the detailss? I know we have 2 posters from the area- I think one from the south end of the line, and one from up around Nanaimo way[;)].
Dale??? What’s the scoop?
For a number of years now, the only revenue service has been the delivery of tankers in and around the Nanaimo area. I don’t know what is in the tankers. Up until about 5 or six years ago, Norske-Skog’s Crofton pulp mill used the services, and the pulp mill in Port Alberni, about 40 miles NW, also used the service. Essentially, the line has been moribund, except for the tanker service and an RDC that runs daily between Victoria and Courtenay, where I am.
I get the sense that some private investors and some aboriginal bands pooled their money, maybe borrowed more, and made the offer to CP for their interests. Rail America has been approached about caving in, but I don’t know where that deal is at the moment.
CP Rail tried to divest itself of the obligation to passenger service between Nanaimo and Port Alberni many years ago when paying ridership fell. True to its leftist tendency, the government delivered CP a solid backhand when CP asked the Feds to abandon the service. The response was, not only will you not abandon it, but you are directed to “improve” it. Go figure.
Three times the petition went to Ottawa, and three times rejected. It finally went to the Supreme Court of Canada about 10 years ago (I think), and they politely told the government to go pound salt.
Is there something more specific?
Crandell-
The mill down in Crofton has not had CP Rail service for at least 20 years. They are served by barge out of Vancouver, I believe by Kingcome Navigation, who also serve the Harmac Mill here in Nanaimo. Dennis Washington (MRL) owns Kingcome now.
http://www.kingcome.com/
Murph-
The CP Rail lines on the Island (E&N) consist of the line from Victoria (mile 0) to the junction at Stockett (mile 70) past my place (mile 73) in Nanaimo and through the junction at Parksville (mile 95) and on to Courtenay (mile 140). There is a 3 mile spur from Stockett to the yard and barge slip at Wellcox, and another 40 mile line from Parksville to Port Alberni. Railamerica bought the Wellcox-Stockett-Parksville-Port Alberni line, and leased the Victoria-Stockett and Parksville-Courtenay lines from CP. The passenger service is a daily Via Rail Canada Victoria-Courtenay-Victoria round trip using one or two Budd RDCs.
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locThumbs.aspx?id=162445
Via Rail contracts out the crew to Railamerica and the maintenance to a Vancouver Company (?)
90% of the traffic was the newsprint mill over in Port Alberni, and they switched to trucks a few years ago. Freight service is now mostly propane tank cars in the Nanaimo area, and I believe some grain is still delivered to Duncan (mile 40).
Both CP and Railamerica have donated their lines to the Island Corridor Foundation, which is registered as a charitable foundation. The Island Corridor Foundation is a group of Native Bands (“Indian Tribes” in the USA ?) and Towns.
So, here we have a little rail line that’s not doing much. How will it break even as a passenger (or passenger/freight? service in the future then? It appears to me, that it would be hard to pay the bills if someone gave you the line.[;)]
The passenger operation is paid by Via Rail, and the new Island shortline should be able to make a profit from operating it. Via is also paying some of the costs of maintaining the line.
And because the line is owned by the municipalities it runs through, it should be paying less in taxes for the land it is on. I’m doubtfull it can operate profitably, but at least it is operating.
Do I gather, then, that there is some plan to increase traffic on the line, or turn it into a major tourist line? It doesn’t sound like there is much traffic now. Would a shortline have potential to build traffic?
Ross Rowland tried to run a tourist service here a couple of years ago and it did not work. He had some locomotives and passenger cars from the Ohio Central, and talked about getting a steam locomotive as well. Scroll down past the map here-
http://www.trainweb.org/canadianrailways/articles/EsquimaltAndNanaimoRailway.htm
They hope they can find more freight traffic. I guess it will take a year or two to find out. Everything has to travel 30 miles by barge over to Vancouver. Dennis Washington (MRL) owns the barges.
http://www.seaspan.com/
CPR divested of the obligation to provide passenger service between Nanaimo and Pt. Alberni, don’t they have to provide this service as part of the agreement for all the free land they were given? ? You mean to say there is no more passenger service in the rest of Canada? I really have to get out more often.
I wonder if CPR giving up their portion of this particular line is some sort of trade-off for not having to maintian service on this particular line?
CP would lose money operating freight service on the south end (Victoria-Duncan) and the north end (Parksville-Courtenay), but they can’t abandon the line because of the passenger service. Via Rail is certainly not going to buy the tracks, so I guess this is the only answer. CP gets a nice tax right off this way. Railamerica has wanted out of the Island since the mill over in Port Alberni switched to trucks. Now they get a nice tax write off as well.
Crandell-
Canadian Pacific has not run passenger service to Port Alberni since the 1950s.
Am I understanding this correctly? When this line is purchased by the new group, VIA will still pay for the passenger service? Then the new operators would hope to pick up more freight traffic, based on (one would think) lower operating costs than what CPR had?
Just curious, what kind of shape is this line in?
Thanks for setting me straight. I read a “fact” sheet at Duncan last year, and I seemed to recall that this had happened comparatively recently, but …the condition of the line suggests many years, 15-20.
Have you walked along the north shore track at Cameron Lake? It is most definitely worth a warm July afternoon…take water.
-Crandell
I’ve walked the whole thing, Victoria to Courtenay, Port Alberni and Lake Cowichan, and about 30 miles of former CN around Victoria. I did about 5 miles at a time, usually on Sundays, back in the late 1970s to mid 1980s, before I went into the PPCLI.
That is about right. Via Rail looses at least $1 million per year on the train. The deal that brought British Columbia into Canada was dependant on a rail line being built out here. Some people say that means the Federal Government has to run passenger trains to Victoria. Also, the tax dollars going to the rest of Canada from British Columbia are over $1 billion per year, so there is a sense that the Federal Government (through Via Rail) owes us something. Don’t you wish you had the same deal, with Amtrak running a Budd RDC over the D&I everyday from Sioux City to Dell Rapids, and back to Sioux City in the afternoon ? Wouldn’t they pay the D&I to man and maintain the train ?
I believe it is mostly 85 lb rail and 4 axel locomotives only.
Do you think VIA would consider running the Budd car on the D&I? We might be willing to join Canada to get it done.[:D]
The history of passenger service on the E&N is a rabbit warren of regulation and litigation. Beginning in the late 1960s, Canadian Pacific made repeated efforts to withdraw passenger service on the E&N, which by then consisted of one Victoria-Courtenay round trip daily except Sunday. Back then the regulatory body was the Canadian Transport Commission, and they ordered the continuation of the service–my hunch is that it was part of a strategy to maintain at least a skeletal rail passenger service nationwide. The locals frequently advanced arguments that the service should be maintained, either as part of the orginal agreement by which BC entered Confederation, or as a condition of the land grant of land which the CPR received when it bought the E&N in 1905, but these arguments were not tested in court until much later. In the late 1970s, shortly before VIA Rail assumed responsibility for all of CP’s remaining intercity passenger routes, the CTC did indeed give CP permission to withdraw passenger service on the E&N, but the resulting hue and cry was so great that the decision was overturned on appeal. I believe that the Provincial Government was a party to the appeal. So VIA took over the run, and turned it into a 7-day-a-week operation, which it remains to this day. Little else changed, however.
Fast forward to 1990, and the federally-mandated VIA cuts. Passenger service on the E&N was slated to be cut, along with most other secondary/branch line services across the country. The Provincial Government took the case to court, and the Supreme Court of BC ruled that there was a constitutional obligation to maintain passenger service between Victoria and Nanaimo. In the event, VIA decided to maintain service over the entire subdivision. The case worked its way through the legal system to the Supreme Court of Canada, which some years later ruled that there was no such constitutional obligation. VIA has remained committed to providing the service, however, and it has survived the sale/lease of th
How long has it been since there were any regular freight service to Courtenay or Victoria? Are there any potential rail customers in either Victoria or Courtenay that a new operator is likely to go after? It seems like a lot of track to maintain for a single daily passenger train.
I am not aware of any customers south of Duncan (40 miles) or north of Parksville (45 miles). That is why RailAmerica wants out.
Murph-
I thought you had a passenger train. I saw a documentary the other week about your Senator Ransom Stoddard and his wife Hallie taking a train back to Washington DC after attending the funeral of Tom Doniphon.[;)]
Is this the thing which runs into Victoria by the harbour area to the south end of the city? I giggled when I saw that and took a few pictures. Somebody asked me why - I said back home I could graze about 500 sheep on it. I am suprised that you dont need to flail mow the track first before you run the trains!
[(-D][}:)] That certainly wasn’t a Budd car! That wasn’t South Dakota. If you’ll notice, in the background, some of the scenery is something other than flat! That should be a dead-givaway.
But you said these live in South Dakota-
http://www.bearcountryusa.com/gallery.asp?ID=6&page=2
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=77959
And didn’t EMD design the SD9 for the hills of South Dakota ?