Taras Grescoe is the author of eight non-fiction books. He writes about transit, cities and the global passenger rail renaissance on his High Speed newsletter.
One evening at half past six, some time in 2026, a minor miracle is scheduled to occur in Toronto. For the first time in 14 years, a passenger train headed for the eastern shores of Ontario’s Lake Nipissing and points north will roll out of Union Station. If all goes well, eight hours and 40 minutes later, passengers in three Venture cars, pulled by a Siemens Charger locomotive in a fresh livery of brilliant blue and yellow, will arrive at a newly built station in Timmins, more than 700 kilometres north of downtown Toronto.
The inaugural run of the Northlander – the precise date this year is still to be determined – will mark the return of Ontario Northland passenger rail service to a storied line that links the Great Lakes to the frigid waters of James Bay.
This isn’t the way things are supposed to work. In Canada, we’ve gotten used to hearing about railway lines disappearing, or, at best, being turned into trails for cyclists, hikers and cross-country skiers. In this vast country, according to the standard narrative, we rely on runways and highways to travel long distances, while railways – outside the subways, commuter rail, and streetcars in big metro areas – are for nostalgics and tourists.
These days, the media is focused on the proposed 1,000-kilometre Alto high-speed rail line, the first segment of which will link Montreal and Ottawa. The corridor between Quebec City and Toronto is home to nearly half the country’s population.
But 6.6 million Canadians live in remote, rural, and northern communities, many of which have been petitioning for better public transportation. For them, the long-overdue revival of the Northlander and other passenger trains will dramatically change their lives for the better.
Starting in 1836, when a group of entrepreneurs completed the Champlain & St. Lawrence Railway, linking Montreal to the Richelieu River, Canada gradually built one of the world’s most extensive and widely admired railway networks. At its peak in the middle of the last century, a web of 49,000 kilometres of mainline tracks, and countless more of branch and shortlines, reached remote hamlets, hunting camps and resource towns, many of which owed their existence to the coming of the iron road.
The history of our railways is indissociable from the exploitation of impoverished labourers, the steamrolling of Indigenous cultures and a distinctly Canadian brand of genteel profiteering. But the heroic efforts of those who worked with pickaxes and nitroglycerine also left us with a fantastically ramified system of transportation corridors, any of which would cost billions if they had to be surveyed, cleared and graded today.
Workmen on the Canadian Pacific Railway line circa 1880 to 1885.The Canadian Press
These 19th- and 20th-century routes, brought back to life with modern low-emission rail technology, could go a long way to solving our transportation woes in the 21st century.
For decades, though, governments have abandoned existing lines. At their mid-century peak, Canadian trains carried upward of 50 million riders a year. Since then, passenger rail service has disappeared entirely from Newfoundland, Vancouver Island, Prince Edward Island, and between Edmonton and Calgary. Under Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives, VIA Rail saw half of its long-distance services axed; gone are such much-loved trains as the Evangeline, the Cabot, le Champlain, the Chaleur, the International and the Ottawa Valley. In North America, fewer than 2 per cent of people have even set foot on an intercity train.
That’s why the imminent return of the Northlander is such welcome news. The line was chartered in 1884, in the hopes settlers wouldn’t follow the Canadian Pacific Railway to the Prairies, but instead colonize “New Ontario,” as boosters then called the province’s north. The discovery of gold and silver near Timmins and Cobalt changed the emphasis from agriculture to resource extraction; for the well-to-do, a Pullman sleeping car service was offered from Buffalo to the Arctic tundra. In 1964, the northern part of the line began to cater to tourists with the launch of the Polar Bear Express excursion train, which still runs between Cochrane and Moosonee.
Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservatives were the first to target Ontario Northland for privatization or elimination. The provincial Liberals cancelled plans for a complete selloff, but under their watch, train service between Toronto and Timmins ended in 2012.
People board the Northlander in North Bay, Ont., in September, 2012, with one day left of service.Stephen C. Host/The Canadian Press
While the line to Moosonee, 20 kilometres short of James Bay, was kept open as an essential service, residents along the southern part of the line have since gotten by with longer, and less comfortable, commutes on intercity buses. Now, a $70-million upgrade to stations, rolling stock, and tracks, including a bypass around the busy North Bay rail yard, promises to bring new life to Washago, North Bay, Englehart and other remote communities.
All this points to the fact that demand for passenger rail is back – if it ever really went away. In the United States, the new Borealis service between Chicago and the Twin Cities attracted a quarter-of-a-million riders in its first year, and Amtrak ridership, buoyed by the return of Mardi Gras service on the Gulf Coast, set an all-time record of 34.5 million passengers last year. While VIA Rail has experienced a comparable surge, in Canada, the real story is the grassroots clamouring for the return of railway lines that once provided a reliable and affordable alternative to cars and planes.
In 2013, VIA Rail ended service east of Matapédia on the southern shore of the Gaspé peninsula. While the 325-kilometre ride to the town of Gaspé, one of the country’s most scenic rail routes, was loved by tourists, it is local residents who have campaigned hardest for its return. Last October, as townspeople gathered at abandoned stations along the route, Alexis Deschênes led a group of his fellow Bloc Québécois MPs on a 15-hour trip from Ottawa to Matapédia to make the case for the restoration of service.
“What I want VIA Rail to understand,” Mr. Deschênes told journalists in October, “is that it’s a Crown corporation that receives $1.3-billion in public funds, and it has a duty to maintain regional service.” Now owned by the Quebec government, the route is being gradually rehabilitated, with freight trains already operating over rebuilt bridges. Full passenger service is expected to be restored by 2027.
On the other side of the country, the last passenger train ran on Vancouver Island in 2011, over the tracks of the old Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway, a line founded by coal baron Robert Dunsmuir.
Passengers head toward the outgoing morning train at the Via Rail station in Victoria, B.C., in 2002. The last passenger train ran on Vancouver Island in 2011.Diana Nethercott/The Globe and Mail
The Island Corridor Foundation, which is jointly owned by 14 First Nations and five regional districts, is campaigning to restore trains to the 289-kilometre corridor from Victoria to Courtenay, which parallels the chronically congested highways up the island’s east coast. (The right-of-way is intact, except for a kilometre-long stretch through the territory of the Snaw-Naw-As First Nation, where the tracks have been torn up to make way for a residential development.)
For all the fraught history of railways bringing the colonists responsible for eroding traditional lifeways, many Indigenous nations have embraced trains. In northern Quebec, Tshiuetin Rail Transportation became the first Indigenous-owned freight and passenger railway in North America. Founded and operated by the Innu and Naskapi nations, it provides a vital lifeline to such tiny northern communities as Shabo, Sawbill and Astray. The success of its passenger service to Schefferville has inspired the Missanabie Cree to build a business case for the Mask-wa Oo-ta-ban, a “Bear Train” that would restore service on the northern stretch of the Algoma Central Railway, in a part of northern Ontario largely unserved by roads.
On the B.C. mainland, the fate of a spectacular route once owned by another provincially owned railway, B.C. Rail, is attracting calls for the restoration of passenger service. Last year, Canadian National gave notice it would discontinue its freight operations on the stretch of track between Squamish and 100 Mile House. Currently, the luxury Rocky Mountaineer excursion train is the only passenger service on the line. Patrick Weiler, the MP representing the Sea-to-Sky region, is leading the call to bring regular train service back, with ticket prices aimed at locals rather than international tourists.
Alberta, as always, is a special case. Seventy per cent of the province’s population lives along the 312-kilometre corridor between Edmonton and Calgary, but train service there ended with the last run of VIA Rail’s Dayliner train in 1985. Transcontinental trains used to call at Calgary and Banff, but VIA Rail’s Canadian now follows the northern route through Edmonton and Jasper. Last year, a proposal was submitted to the Major Projects Office – which is overseeing the Alto project – to link the Calgary airport to Banff with a hydrogen-powered train. The project is the brainchild of banker-turned-oil tycoon Adam Waterous, the chair of crude oil producer Strathcona Resources.
There’s no question Alberta could use more passenger rail. It’s too bad that what gets attention is flashy megaprojects, like the hyperloop, proposed by Toronto’s TransPod, that would link Calgary and Edmonton in 45 minutes, or a 400-kilometre-per-hour high-speed train pitched by a company called Prairie Link.
The Calgary-to-Banff train has a better chance of being built, but hydrogen, a fuel that is a by-product of natural gas production, should be a non-starter. There’s no need to greenwash fossil fuels to run trains. We’ve already got plenty of electricity generated by solar, wind and hydro dams, which, transmitted by catenary wires, could turn our diesel-powered long-distance trains into a truly sustainable mode of transportation.
If we’re serious about a passenger rail revival, we need look no farther than India, which has electrified 100 per cent of its rail network in the last decade. And remoteness and long distances needn’t be an obstacle: Russia powers its Trans-Siberian train – through more than 9,000 kilometres of tundra, taiga and boreal forest – entirely with electricity drawn from overhead wires.
Last May, I rode the VIA Rail route from Jasper to Prince Rupert, a train formerly known as The Skeena. On the two-day trip, I met tourists from Ontario, the United States and New Zealand, but they were outnumbered by locals doing short hops between such villages as Dunster, McBride and New Hazelton, as well as such First Nations communities as Kitwanga. Many were single women, who preferred the security of the train to hitchhiking; since the 1970s, as many as 50 women, most of them Indigenous, have been murdered or reported missing along the stretch of the Trans-Canada parallel to the tracks, which has come to be known as the “Highway of Tears.” For anyone experiencing domestic abuse, the next train out of town can be the one that saves your life.
The railway to Prince Rupert is a rare survivor, one the people of northern B.C. are lucky to have. (Credit should be given to Taylor Bachrach, the former NDP MP for Skeena-Bulkley Valley, who has campaigned for better passenger rail, and priority over freights, with cross-country train trips between Ottawa and his home riding.)
In other places, politicians excused the killing of trains by promising they would be replaced by intercity buses. But in 2018, Greyhound pulled all service from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, northern Ontario and B.C.; three years later, the company left Canada altogether. (The German company FlixBus has since acquired Greyhound Lines, restoring service in some areas, though fares can be double what they were before.) There is a cruel irony to the fact that governments in thrall to privatization and austerity, some of them politically entwined with the providers of intercity bus services, killed off the publicly funded trains that provided reliable lifelines to their constituents, only to have private bus companies abandon lines when they stopped generating profits.
Via Rail's Atlantic passenger train heads from Saint John, N.B., in December, 1994, shortly before the train service was discontinued.Peter Walsh/The Canadian Press
A lack of transport options has condemned the millions of Canadians who live in low-density rural, remote or northern communities to isolation, and in some cases, despair and debilitation. More generally, a third of us are too young, too old or have some kind of disability which prevents us from driving. For others, the cost of car ownership or air travel is simply too damn high.
We’re lucky that generations of Canadians before us thought this through, and built an astonishingly far-flung network of corridors to keep us connected. The imminent return of trains to northern Ontario and the Gaspé Peninsula is great news. But we need to make sure it’s only the beginning of a long-lasting national passenger rail revival.
Train track icons: Getty Images/iStockphoto