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All of VIA’s operating subsidies (i.e. its operating deficit, or: revenues minus operating costs) are paid by the federal government, therefore the accounting doesn’t matter. However, each Annual Report reports (fully-allocated) operating deficits for each route, which makes it possible to...

Sure, it‘s impossible to cover all kinds of travel patterns with a measly three-times-per-week schedule, but as I wrote just three posts ago, Prince George is the big city of Northern BC and therefore the by far most-important destination for the kind of remote travel for which this service is...

May I ask you what non-tourist traffic potential you see between Jasper (pop. 4,100) and Prince Rupert (pop.13,200), which are a cool 1160 km (725 mi) apart? Local transportation needs are centered around Prince George, the by-far largest city in Northern BC (with a CA population of 90k) and...

The Chateaus are in pretty rough condition. It would be impossible to offer a consistent service standard when mixing them with Manors and tour operatirs would certainly balk if some of their customers ended up in one. But as I can confirm from my own experiences from being outside, inside VIA...

Oh yeah, I forgot this: don’t schedule anything you wouldn‘t want to miss or would have to reschedule within 24 hours of arrival time. Arrival delays have become much less epidemic and massive as 5 years ago (and most trains actually arrive in Vancouver or Toronto early these days), but you‘ll...

My #1 advice to any night train travellers is to adjust their sleep schedule to maximize the daylight views on the scenery. Another one would be to download an offline map like “OSMAnd” to be able to track the train’s current position without mobile/cell phone reception…

The best way to kill any modest rail proposal and to prevent anything from ever happening is to shout “BuT iT hAs To Be HSR!1!!!”, which would easily increase the financial scale of this project by factor 100. Also, if you look at the timetable hinted in the “Factsheets” shown in that article...

If I remember correctly, Renaissance cars have five types of couplers: - the standard couplers are Male/Female, where male connects with female - then there are Quick Couplers which connect with other quick couplers and allow to relatively easily remove entire blocks of cars - then there are...

Just because cars and locomotives are swapped against equivalent car and locomotive types does not mean that a new plan is in place. Dispatching is a normal process in which a plan is adjusted on an ad-hoc basis to match it with the available ressources and the circumstances of the day. PS...

Clearly not a revenue move, if you read the description of the video you shared: It’s just an equipment move…

The Siemens trainsets are physically and technically incompatible with the legacy fleet, whereas the Renaissance cars just have couplers which are incompatible with the legacy fleet, unless you use „Baggage Transition“ cars. Therefore, the Siemens trainsets (and also the Renaissance trainsets in...

Not sure what exactly “on a run” is intended to mean here, but I’d just like to point out that VIA does not and will not run a mix of Venture and legacy cars in the same consist or on the same train…

Maybe easier to read:

Next rare mileage opportunities (Toronto-Aldershot via Georgetown and then the Halton Sub to Burlington):

All details of the Corridor deployment can now be found directly on VIA‘s website (click on „See Train Schedule“ to expand the actual list of trains): https://www.viarail.ca/en/plan/new-fleet

Face forward (access is from the bullet lounge). Unlike with the Skylines, the car orientation was never reversed…: https://www.viarail.ca/en/plan/our-trains/park-car

No worries, there will be many more “rare mileage” opportunities to come. Just watch the VIA Rail website for travel advisories like this one:

Peak season usually starts around April 30, not April 15 and the additional equipment is added in Vancouver, not Toronto, which means that the consist and numbering should follow off-peak logic (with the number of revenue cars indeed warying according to booking volume). Below is the line-up...

Thank you for posting this and it matches with the comments I‘ve received in the meanwhile that a) the Crew Chateau is now a Manor and behind the front Diner, not the back Diner and b) that I confused the line number order of the Manors (which count from-back-to-front in the off-peak and...

Dealing with foreign currencies sucks, doesn’t it? I had to carry around the $20 I got from that lovely American couple I helped planning their rail trip in the Rhine valley for five years in my money belt before I finally had the opportunity to pay with it on US soil. However, a good way to get...