Quote:
Originally Posted by eternallyme
Railways are federal jurisdiction, and due to the fact they would rather ship all their goods through Toronto, it left the Ottawa Valley abandoned. Can't blame the MTO at all there, blame Transport Canada and the railways themselves. Also traffic counts warrant 4 lanes well up the Ottawa Valley already, much farther than exists now.
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The fact that the railways in question are under federal jurisdiction (and not all are under federal jurisdiction) is irrelevant to the issue of whether the government of Ontario, through its supposed "Ministry of Transportation", should [have] intervene[d] to acquire the RoWs and their tracks (i.e. "railbanking").
One thing you have to understand is that the private railways have a limited time horizon (less than five years for the most part, and definitely less than ten) and they definitely don't consider the importance of their lines to the economic health of the regions through which they pass. And that's fine as far as it goes, but governments are supposed to be looking out decades into the future and have a more encompassing view of the role of railways and infrastructure generally. We basically don't see this with the feds - they've allowed CFB Petawawa to be cut off from rail access, after all - and we don't see it all with the Province of Ontario. Quebec is somewhat better, but even they haven't intervened too heavily, perhaps due to the tangled issue of a cross-border line when Ontario shows no interest in intervening. The municipalities are often the ones who see the problem but their finances often don't permit them to intervene (except in this case for the City of Ottawa, which could have bought both lines clear to Mattawa for less than the cost of its average transitway project).
A railway line can be "uneconomic" from the point of view of CN or CP in the sense that they don't make financial sense (and even here much of the time that is really to say "not profitable
enough" as opposed to a line actually losing money on operations), but that same line may be necessary for a bunch of other industries in the area that actually make the line "economic" in the aggregate (i.e. the value of the related economic activity exceeds the cost of operating the line). We understand this concept for roads quite well and even airports and ports, but for railways we've got this idea stuck in our heads that they should be self-contained businesses encompassing everything from infrastructure to rolling stock.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
I believe there is a provision in the federal legislation that does allow the provinces to "save" rail lines and acquire them for net salvage value.
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Indeed there is. And the municipalities and transit agencies have the same option, which every now and then actually is exercised.
GO Transit, for instance, has exercised that option a few times and it even rail banked the line to Barrie for years before upgrading it for commuter rail service.
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