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If there is one vehicle with which I definitely wouldn’t want to enter a wildfire area, it would be a train: Can‘t just turn around, can‘t just take a detour…

Apparently, a bus bridge was put in place by VIA, to cover the gap between Jasper and Edmonton: https://groups.io/g/Canadian-Passenger-Rail/topic/98735335

Agreed, I dropped SSM and converted Toronto-Sudbury-Thunder Bay-Winnipeg into a night train. As you can see, the TRTO-WNPG night train's estimated ridership potential is not even twice that for LNDN-SARN and it feeds almost exclusively (94%) from Toronto-centric traffic: I would assume that...

Under the current schedule, the Canadian departs Vancouver at 15:00 on Day 1 and spits you out in Vancouver almost exactly 4 days later, with a minimum fare of $549 in Economy Class: With a connection of day trains, you would depart Vancouver in the morning and arrive in Toronto 6-and-a-half...

I don’t know if they briefly dropped the name, but I always thought they took pride in running the oldest named train in North America. In any case, I received this Email from them today, where they still call it “the Ocean”:

Can’t check my timetable database right now, but VIA stopped naming their Corridor trains in 1997 (IIRC) and its Remote trains soonafter, leaving only the Canadian and the Ocean. I don’t know when they dropped the name for the Ocean, but that must be a very recent change…

Thank you, my intention was to show that even though there are a lot of different objectives you can achieve with a once-daily schedule, many of them are unfortunately mutually exclusive and therefore you are stuck with painful tradeoffs which decimate whatever markets you can actually serve...

Greg Gormick is without a doubt one of the most prolific railway historians on this side of the border, but just to highlight the "quality" of his recommendations: In Section 5.2.3 of his 1-4-10 plan, he estimates that "the construction of a 42-mile Smiths Falls Gananoque cutoff [...] would...

I sense some kind of consensus here that VIA ought to operate Toronto-Winnipeg, Winnipeg-Calgary-Vancouver, Winnipeg-Edmonton-Vancouver, Regina-Saskatoon and Edmonton-Calgary at-least daily. Let's ignore Edmonton-Calgary for now, but as someone who has been lucky enough to get exposure to the...

To put things into perspective: Toronto & Winnipeg are approximately 1500 km (950 miles) apart, the same distance as Munich-Istanbul, Boston-Atlanta or Seattle-Los Angeles. The only relevant population centres along the CP route are Kenora (15k), Thunder Bay (123k) and Sudbury (171k) with a...

I‘ve never heard of any such plans, but would be very curious to learn more about them!

Even though everything East of Manitoba is commonly referred to as “Eastern Canada”, the on-train crew members (OTS) are the same which work the entire route from Toronto to Vancouver (though they are replaced by a fresh crew at Winnipeg), just like the overwhelming majority of Sleeper Plus...

I recall that VIA opened a base for On-Train Staff in Ottawa maybe 5 years ago, given their struggle to attract enough candidates in Toronto which would be sufficiently fluent in both official languages and willing to work on the salary of a public-sector service job. I don’t want to know how...

I believe everything which had to be said about the question of pre-clearance in Montreal has already been said: i.e. if it ever comes, there would only be one facility where passengers clear customs (at Gare Centrale, before boarding or after detraining any cross-border train) and trains would...

I am well aware that moving the border checks away from the actual border necessitates the elimination of the stop in Saint-Lambert and more meant „why would they be able to insist on keeping that stop?“. For instance, the Province of Quebec certainly doesn‘t have any say in border matters and...

Why would VIA Rail or the Province of Quebec have any say in whether the train should continue to stop in Saint Lambert or not?

The Canadian operates backwards only when backing into the stations of Saskatoon, Edmonton and Vancouver and westbound also when backing from the Newmarket Subdivision onto the North York Subdivision at Snider (approx. 45 minutes after leaving Toronto). At all other times it will be moving in...

As has been pointed out to me in the meanwhile, it indeed seems like there are some temporary issues which require the payment of taxes in actual money rather than points:

As I’ve already written elsewhere, Im not sure why some people seem to believe that the statement that „products purchased with VIA Preference points will require the payment of taxes“ would include actual rail travel…