VIA Buys the Brockville Subdivision

VIA has purchased the Brockville Subdivision (Brockville-Smiths Falls) from Canadian Pacific. This now puts nearly the entire 235 km line from Brockville through Ottawa and onto Coteau under VIA ownership.

http://www.viarail.ca/en/about-via-rail/media-room/latest-news/99672/23-november-2015-via-rail-expands-its-rail-network-acqui

VIA has already upgraded the Brockville Subdivision with additional sidings and a new CTC system for higher speeds. There's 16 trains a day...... 8 each way between Toronto and Ottawa with some continuing through Ottawa to/from Montreal.

Excellent, I used to ride between Windsor/ Oakville and Ottawa fairly often, and always wished there were more Trains to Ottawa!

If I remember correctly, there's some weird CN ownership of part of the line in Ottawa proper; I hope VIA can buy that soon too.

This means the only major "freight-owned" via segment from Ottawa to Montreal will be Couteau-Gare Central in Montreal. Which is short. Maybe eventually separate tracks can be put along that part of the route; it'll be hard because most of the route is freight mainline.

GO Transit has bought most of its routes as well. A VIA train from Toronto to Ottawa will now leave GO Transit territory at Pickering and enter VIA territory at Brockville. With some work this might be rearranged to keep VIA on the GO tracks through Oshawa or Bowmanville.

It's going to take a lot more money to get an exclusive passenger line from Bowmanville to Brockville, since it will mostly require building the new track from scratch, but the current boss at VIA has stated his intent to do so. There's only seven stations on that section, so not a lot of station-moving needed. Here's hoping!

VIA also owns from Windsor halfway to London (though sadly not on the tunnel route); GO is trying to get exclusive passenger tracks as far as Guelph; and Guelph-London is owned by a shortline who will be happy to sell; so a full passenger corridor from Windsor to Toronto is a real possibility too.

VIA's current boss (Yves Desjardins-Siciliano) seems to understand the crucial importance of the passenger operator owning the line -- on-time performance is dismal when the freight railroad owns the line, and goes upwards of 90% when the passenger railroad owns the line. GO Transit and AMT both seem to understand this as well. This bodes well for Canada's passenger rail future.