The province’s recently announced $7.5 million funding commitment will go halfway to restoring Vancouver Island’s E&N Railway, which has been fighting for its survival since the deteriorated track stopped passenger service in March and slowed freight runs to a crawl.
Since last October, rail service owner Island Corridor Foundation (ICF) has been petitioning the provincial and federal governments for $15 million to replace 104,000 rail ties (see “Vancouver Island rail fights for survival” – issue 1122; April 26-May 2).
Last week, Premier Christy Clark committed the provincial half of that funding.
“It’s really important for people on the Island to have this passenger service for tourism but also for freight, and we want to do what we can to preserve it and see if it can work for the people of the Island,” she told a media scrum following the announcement.
“This is a big job creator, potentially.”
The province has dedicated $500,000 for an engineering inspection of the condition of the approximately 40 rail bridges and trestles on the line – a project that is already moving ahead, according to ICF executive director Graham Bruce.
The $7 million balance is conditional on the federal government funding the remaining half of the $15 million project. Bruce noted that the conditional nature of the province’s commitment isn’t a new stumbling block for ICF; he said the ICF agrees that the project requires the full $15 million.
“If rail’s to continue to run on Vancouver Island, that other $7.5 million is going to have to come across. This wasn’t a piecemeal application. It was to both [the provincial and federal governments].”
Bruce added that he’s confident that the federal government will announce the remaining project funds “in the next several weeks.”
John Duncan, MP for Vancouver Island North and federal minister of aboriginal affairs and northern development, did not offer any comment on the likelihood of federal funding coming through.
“I’m not at liberty to talk in any detail,” he said. “I will say that I’m continuing my advocacy.”
Duncan called the future of the rail line “something that’s quite exciting for Vancouver Island.”
“I think that people haven’t really wrapped their head around the fact that the Island’s got basically the same population as New Brunswick,” he said. “We’ve got a high-growth area of the country that’s long and narrow and needs a corridor for the future.”
Bruce said if the federal money comes through, the track overhaul should take approximately a year to complete and passenger service between Nanaimo and Victoria could be operational again by mid-fall.
At that point, he said, the hope is to have the daily passenger service run from Nanaimo to Victoria and back to Nanaimo, which Bruce said will enable daily train commutes to and from Victoria. The previous passenger service started in Victoria, picked up in Nanaimo and then returned Victoria. That stranded would-be Nanaimo commuters in the capital city for the evening.
Beyond anticipated passenger gains from reversing that trip direction, Bruce said he expects to see the track overhaul generate new business through tourist excursion trains serving, among other markets, the new Nanaimo cruise terminal.
But he stressed that “probably the most important gain” from the track improvement will be increased freight business, which he anticipates could come from aggregate producers, Compliance Energy Corp.’s (TSX-V:CEC) proposed coal mine near Courtenay and forestry companies.
“It’s been very challenging for our rail operator, Southern Rail [of Vancouver Island Ltd.], to be very aggressive in knocking on potential customers’ doors without the assurance that rail was going to be here,” Bruce said, stating that that problem will disappear if the project moves forward.
Bruce said he wasn’t surprised at the provincial funding coming through, just as he’s expecting the federal money to follow shortly.
“You can’t continue to talk about the needs of transportation changes, greenhouse gases, climate change and all sorts of other aspects and not deal with the very practical application that’s right here before everybody with respect to the rail line on Vancouver Island. Any other jurisdiction in the world, they would die for a corridor like this that travels within five miles of 500,000 of the 750,000 people who live on Vancouver Island.”