Rail making a comeback

[seaclock22]

I’ve been thinking a lot about getting our rail service back over the last few months. Obviously it’s nothing more than a “what if...” game. I’d guess that this forum and Facebook are populated mostly by people with an Annapolis Valley perspective so let me offer more of a western NS point of view.

For a glimpse of how things have changed since January 1990, in 1989 Yarmouth was served by two national airlines, two bus companies, two ferries to Maine, and VIA Rail. In 2022 it’s all gone. We keep trying to get a ferry back but we’ll see. The only ground transportation to Halifax is a van service that obviously has a much lower capacity than any other mode of travel and is less comfortable. I guess its only plus is it will take you directly to your destination. Of all our losses the first to go was the train.

I’ve taken to walking a lot of the trail in Yarmouth Co. over the last several months and something that jumps out at me is just how straight or gently curved the right of way is. Looking at the map of Digby Co. I’d say much the same of the route there as well. I’m no civil engineer so my impressions may be completely wrong. It seems to me, however, that if the line were rebuilt to contemporary standards at least in western NS the maximum speeds could be higher than they used to be and would certainly allow a passenger train to travel at speeds that would make it competitive with a car. There’s no reason it should take over five hours to get from Yarmouth to Halifax by train like it used to in the Dayliner days.

Unfortunately, the big problem, as has already been mentioned, is that people never give a thought to the amount of money that is spent on roads and will forever be spent on roads even though highways never turn a profit. It’s not even a consideration. With rail, money will always be the number one problem. As long as we don’t think about transportation in a coordinated or integrated way, and we never will, we’ll never see different modes as pieces of the same puzzle. This also means thinking about how industry fits in and the possibility of getting certain products and resources off the roads and onto rail. (How many tanker trucks per day go back and forth on the 101 or 103, for example?)

As I said, I know this is nothing but a “what if” game. It would have made much more sense to hold on to the rail line and upgrade it than to ever try to launch a campaign to get it back. The same with everything that’s gone. But if we had it back and it was fast I have no doubt people would use it. (And I’m not talking about some fantasy of high speed rail, just normal fast trains.) I could talk about this all day but that’s enough for now.

[stem]

The NS Gov is more interested in off-shore oil and the Halifax-Dartmouth metro area. They keep throwing money at tourism and have invested in dumb things like coal mines instead of using the NS brain trust and investing in tech industry and rail and letting them do the tourism like the W&AR and DAR did. They're riding the donkey backwards; or are they the donkey?