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Ontario Northland piggybacking on VIA’s order for another 3 shorter (3-car instead of 5-car) trainsets comes to mind as a model…

If you want to procure rolling stock for use on Canadian mainlines, it needs to adher to FRA/TC crashworthiness standards. No active production line in Europe, China or India produces night train rolling stock complying with these standards (as none of their regular customers requires them)...

For the purposes of fleet renewals, VIA is faced by the same constraints as Amtrak, not those “the rest of the world operates with”. Given that Tren Maya doesn’t (to the best of my knowledge) share tracks with freight and is not regulated by TC or the FRA, they are not bound to procuring...

3 sets (a fourth set was required in summer when the third weekly frequency operated, but it has last operated in 2019). Approximately 10 cars in winter and 20 cars in summer…

Again: VIA might need ready-to-deploy Sleeper cars which may act as a stopgap for a few years until the new fleet (hopefully) arrives, not another fleet of cars which first needs massive investments before it is available for service…

Acquiring sleeper cars second-hand from Amtrak is one thing, but completely rebuilding cars which have been discarded and were never built for North American specs is an extremely poor use of taxpayer money. Canada should focus on getting the RFP out and the contract signed as soon as possible...

No, and the CETA (Canada-EU Trade Agreement) forbids it to errect such trade barriers. However, its national regulator, Transport Canada, usually aligns with its American counterpart (FRA), which all but disqualifies designs from outside North America…

Exactly! As I wrote elsewhere: VIA would be stuck behind the queue of this and all other existing orders…

The deadline doesn’t seem to come from VIA, but from Transport Canada (Canada’s FRA) itself as the responsible regulator: https://groups.io/g/Canadian-Passenger-Rail/topic/commons_transport_committee/104341216?p=Created,,,20,1,20,0&jump=1 Note: I don’t necessarily trust whatever information...

As long as there are mandated routes west of Ontario, you’ll need a service which can shuffle the equipment between the maintenance centers and the Canadian is the most cost-effective way to achieve this. The Ocean, on the other hand, is much more vulnerable, but the restoration of the Gaspé...

Even though your narrative of the Liberals being pro-VIA and the Conservatives being anti-VIA generally holds up, there are some notable exceptions with the Pepin cuts (Liberals) in 1981, Martin (Liberals) axing the VIA Fast proposal in 2004 and Harper (Conservatives) investing some C$500...

Below is a list of all HEP Manor/Chateau Sleepers in VIA’s fleet of which my Trackside Guide 2021 is aware of: Anyways, making unserviceable cars serviceable requires capital funding - for cars which are almost 70 years old. Remind me again, what is the pressing problem we are trying to fix here…?

May I ask in which way unfinished Renaissance Sleeper shells rotting around at Thunder Bay (if they have haven’t been already scrapped by now) might be useful for the Skeena?

VIA lacks the fleet, funding and mandate to do so. The hotel industry in Prince George would cry foul and rightly so…

Which part of my previous response (below) to @Rasputin do you want to rediscuss?

From my memory: The Super Continental (and the Montreal-Sudbury branch of the Canadian) was cancelled in November 1981 and replaced by the following: CAPR-SLKT-WNPG: tri-weekly sleeper service WNPG-Regina-SASK: daily service SASK-EDMO: daily RDC service EDMO-JASP-PGEO-PRUP: tri-weekly sleeper...

My CN/CP timetable archive can be found here. My VIA timetable archive can be found here

Many Russian night trains operate by this method (i.e. even or uneven days). However, you need to skip departures on the 31st of January, March, May, July, August, October and December (as well as 29th of Februar, in leap years) and at subsequent stations there will be alterations in departure...

VIA’s long-distance fleet is entering its eighth decade of service soon and already starting to fall apart, but all what some railfans want to think of is the perceived urgent need to expand VIA’s non-Corridor services rather than securing the survival of these services in the first place by...

Thank you for these kind words! I’m always happy to share the knowledge I have obtained, but I’m at times at risk of becoming too emotionally invested, which was a main reason I left VIA. I recall from my own experience that it was much easier to criticize VIA’s Management for “not doing the...