With Lloyd Axworthy in charge of the MOT there were reviews of the 1981 service plan. Axworthy was an urban planner before entering parliament, so he probably understood that not having had a public input process meant that there had been no check for flaws. Not to mention outraging elements of the public, whether they rode trains or just might want to someday. And the uproar was not stopping. The mayor of Melville carried on.On the agreed-upon Sunday afternoon, Mayor Don Abel arrived in style. My 7-year old son was highly impressed. He had heard about mayors (from "Mr. Rogers") and the well-chromed, maroon Lincoln out front fit his idea of how a mayor should be driven about town. It turned out that the mayor's long-time friend in Edmonton was a car collector!
Once we and the neighbors had admired the car, we got down to business with papers spread on the kitchen table. For two years before the November 1981 Pepin cutbacks, Melville and other on-line cities had followed a Canadian Transport Commission study of transcontinental service. All of the alternatives west of Winnipeg had service on both the CN and CP main lines to Vancouver. The Pepin cutbacks had come out of the blue. I learned from him that municipalities were being ignored just as thoroughly as advocacy groups.
In situations like this there are always a lot of things that fit the "don't know what you don't know" category. Mayor Abel knew MP Lloyd Axworthy, who not only was one of the two governing party members from west of the Great Lakes, but also had grown up in a town near Melville. I did not know that when I handed Abel a copy of the "counterfeit" VIA Panorama schedule.
The effort continued. It was fascinating to me to see how uninterested the government was, perhaps out of fear of having been wrong. I don't have files of the T-2000 effort, but accidentally saved this example of courteous public comment that received nothing more than acknowledgement.
George Lambert was a retired Alberta school inspector and knew people in the small towns along the line. He knew how to write to government officials. The Saskatchewan group was also well-connected and well-spoken. The British Columbia group was enthusiastic, but as often is the case for BC, concerned also with provincial issues. And, they had one of the few route segments where there really was duplication by the two transcontinental lines (the other being in Manitoba), so the loss of service was harder to explain.
Through-out 1982 the patched-up network continued to serve customers who were trying to ride trains. Some ended up on the floor in Calgary. "Thank you, Canada."
Change was coming. In August 1983, Jean Luc Pepin was quietly shoved into a parliamentary corner and MP Lloyd Axworthy was named Minister of Transport. Axworthy asked for a review of the 1981 changes and pledged to "reestablish the credibility" of VIA Rail as a national service.
Next = Rumours fly, rail passengers try...
Earlier in 1983, the CN was trying to tear down stations on the former Super Continental route in BC. As reflected in the clipping above, actions like that were happening across the country, literally from Atlantic to Pacific.
By spring 1983 the rumour was that a Super Continental through train would run Winnipeg-Edmonton, connecting with the Skeena at Edmonton and with the Canadian at Winnipeg.
By March 1984, as the last Rail Canada item above indicates, the rumour in VIA circles was that the "new" train would be named the Panorama. I was surprised, but had other things on my mind, so I never followed up to find out how that happened.
It seems that my counterfeit VIA Rail timetable showing a through Winnipeg-Prince Rupert train named Panorama was Xeroxed and was circulated in Ottawa and Montreal - not to mention Melville. As it looked like a VIA product and there was no cover sheet, it is likely that people thought it was an internal document.
Meanwhile, VIA Rail continued with the makeshift routing through South Edmonton.
Next = an attempt at reorganizing VIA.
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