cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/403518
Freight trolleys in the back, passenger trolleys in the front.
@TheEnigmaBlade
@canada
With only passenger cars, the train can speed up and slow down quickly. If you chain hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cargo to it, doing station stops would require slowing down many minutes in advance, and speeding up would take much longer to get up to speed.And just in general, passenger trains go significantly faster with different stop patterns. I’ve ridden the Cascades line that has its northern terminus in Vancouver, B.C. a lot. It comes to a full stop for all of maybe two minutes at the smaller stops, whereas freight takes large periods of time.
What was that trip like? Good scenery?
It’s fantastic. You go along various bodies of water, forest, farmland, small towns, and various other scenery. There has been one downgrade in scenery, though. The Point Defiance Bypass route ended use of the single track route around Point Defiance, which is one of the loveliest legs of the trip. That said, it also cuts off a lot of the weather related issues and a few minutes of travel time.
Beyond scenery, let’s just say it’s all relative. It’s better than most corridors in the US of its size. But the journey from Vancouver to Portland is still going to run once a day, start early in the morning, and take a good eight hours. It’s hard to make the case for taking the train to most people when they can pay twice the amount of money and be there in a little over an hour instead. The one big difference I suppose is that trains can easily take bikes for just $5, whereas planes require an involved process and greater expense.
That sounds fun. I do like train journeys. For the journey itself as much as getting to the destination. Might have to add that one to my list.
When I went to Vancouver on my honeymoon from Portland where I live, I got on at around 8:30. Because of that, I got to really enjoy the scenery. But during the return trip, it starts at 6:30, plus extra time for customs and transportation to the train station. We were pretty zonked.
All that’s to say, that’s one corridor that really needs high speed rail. The Portland to Seattle stretch has already proven itself with strong ridership figures. A high speed rail line would be of great mutual benefit to the region. I hope that Canada and the US can work together in the future to make it a reality.
It’s surprising that this doesn’t already exist. It’s already made quite easy to commute between Washington and BC. A decent train line to Portland opening another easy link with Oregon makes sense. I suppose the infrastructure is currently built for cars and planes. But if both countries get serious about carbon emissions, it makes sense to massively expand the rail network down the whole west coast. It would still be a trek, but with a high speed rail, it could become feasible to add California as one fast train from Vancouver.
They don’t want to.
CP and CN are Canada’s largest freight carriers, which are privately owned. They see VIA as nothing but a burden on their highly efficient, well oiled freight machine (can you feel the sarcasm in my words? seriously, fuck them both). They refuse to even let VIA run on the vast majority of their tracks, going as far as to remove tracks they no longer and making the infrastructure as passenger service unfriendly as possible to discourage VIA from getting any ideas, what makes you think they’d, A, let VIA directly compete with them with their own freight service, or 2, let VIA stick their carriages on their freight trains?
@TheEnigmaBlade because its efficient for cargo, for people cars or planes are better
