What makes you believe that the current travel time could be matched (or even beaten) on these secondary routes which haven't seen passenger service in 60 years? Have you checked the current speed limits or the siding lengths and spacing? Who is going to pay for upgrading these tracks to satisfy the minimum requirements for operating passenger trains at an acceptable speed? And why would it be more worthwhile than investing the same amount in upgrading the CN main line where it would benefit much more trains than just 4-6 passenger trains per week?
Why should anyone spend a single tax dollar on restoring a rail service which wouldn't stand a chance to compete with the downtown-to-downtown travel time of either driving, busing or flying?
For starters a route where you can consistently move 40-60 MPH is much better than one where you are stopping every thirty minutes for thirty minutes while waiting on freights moving at 80 MPH. On the busy mainline even if track speed is high you can't really obtain it because you are always riding on the approach or slowing down to enter the next siding. So in reality your 80 is 40-60 at best. So lets take that further if you stop for thirty minutes that effectively cuts your average speed down to 20-30 MPH because you figure that you are sitting for half of that hour it takes to get up to the 40-60 range.
Meanwhile you have two under utilized routes that run to the north between Saskatoon and Winnipeg that appear to be both in the CN looks to be about a 40-60 MPH line, vs the CP which looks like it is 60 MPH to 80 MPH looking at the track condition. But for simple cases lets just say both are 60 MPH. Yes both routes are slightly longer than the current route but they also serve higher populations as well. So while the CN mainline you are averaging in that 20-30 Mile range you could have covered twice the territory on the line with far less freight service. So you could shorten the timetable back up, or even if you left the insane amount of padding in it you could at least be guaranteed of departing Winnipeg east reasonably close to schedule.
Going west out of Saskatoon I would still be tempted to use the CP route at least as far as Camrose before taking the CN line into Edmonton at that point. Again less traffic means you are spending more time moving covering territory than you are when you are crawling between siding to siding.
At this point it is about service reliability to make it justifiable to put an actual investment in the train. You already have problems in Ottawa with people thinking this train runs just for foreign tourists, partially because it is so unreliable the people who live out west can't count on it. Why would I take a train that doesn't run every day, runs up to 20 hours late regularly to go between Saskatoon and Edmonton. When I could drive it in a few hours and be guaranteed to arrive on time. If you want VIA Rail to be healthy in the future it has to be more than about tourists out west and it has to loose its corridor centric mindset. We have the same problem in the USA we pit the "successful" Northeast Corridor against the National Network trains when in reality the two should be working hand in hand with each other as both need each other to survive. What you get when you take the western provinces or the maritimes out of the equation is the question "why should I fund a train in Montreal or even better yet Senneterre that I do not use, that I will never use?"
So lets focus on making the Western provinces at least have reliable enough service that it can be counted on by the population that lives there. I'm not saying that some place like Unity or Biggar needs the equivalent service level of Dorval or Drummondville that would be insane to service those small towns with the same frequency. But we can improve their service to more than twice a week and make the train not so unreliable schedule wise that it actually makes it a usable train for them instead of their automobile. The people who live in these towns are just as important as the ones who live inside the corridor and it's time we start treating them with the same level of services and support in proportion of their population as those who live in more populated areas.
Next thing VIA needs to do is drastically shorten the Canadian and expand the service to being more frequent. Do you really need to run 8-12 sleepers on one run. If you shorten it and use the Chateau fleet which is relatively unused you could provide a much better service to the west.
What is up with this obsession with "well if it isn't competitive with flying or driving then why should I fund it"? Amtrak's Piedmont isn't competitive with flying for starters. And I should know that I fly the GSO-CLT, and RDU-CLT routes for work. It also 40 minutes faster to drive than the train is end to end. Yet the train manages to have 211,887 passengers which isn't even the whole picture as it doesn't count the Carolinian's ridership on the same corridor. And the southeastern USA has far worse transit connections than Calgary or Edmonton. Amtrak and the State of North Carolina have made this service successful there is no reason you can't copy it's formula to any other corridor in the USA and Canada.
Then you have some other trains like the Carbondale-Chicago, or Quincy-Chicago that also don't make sense using your metric as the rural areas are at the end of the route but yet the routes are doing just fine. It isn't always about the effective drive time or flight time as you will never be able to truly beat those.
Now for some fun on the Corridor (Toronto-Montreal) it takes 5 hours 10 Minutes on VIA, 5 Hours 14 Minutes by driving, and the plane does it in a fifth of the time and is much more frequent than VIA. Ottawa is thirty minutes faster to drive to Toronto and 12 minutes slower to drive to Montreal. So should we stop funding these trains because Air Canada and WestJet can beat them by substantial times? Of course not because they aren't competing in the same marketplace.
Rail is a public service and it's time we stop treating it as a business but more as a service for the publics benefit.
And if you would like to see why the Piedmont formula is a success I would be happy to host you and give you a guided tour of the Piedmont service both on board, and in each community it serves. I live in the area and I can arrange that really rather easily.
You just beat me, although I didn't have a map that was as readable. As stated, CN has two roughly parallel routes between Winnipeg and Edmonton, and I'd describe CP's route as more of a network of shorter connected lines - well illustrated in the first map, where they couldn't be described as straight west of Saskatoon. CP's main is the one most are familiar with to the South.
CP's line is a bit like that but it's still one cohesive line that even at one time had a name train the "Great Western" that operated Winnipeg to Edmonton. So it wouldn't be unprecedented either. Most people forget those two Northern lines remain aside from the CN Main line.
