Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Getting here used to be half the fun

The B.C. Rail Budd cars are gone, but train travel is not forgotten
1446feature
The Budd Cars cross the Cheakamus River.

Judy McNolty has fond memories of the train trips she used to take from Pemberton to North Vancouver, or up to Lillooet to visit with family. “It was so relaxing,” she remembers. “I got on the train and could sleep, read, or chat with friends. I loved the journey, the scenery. Now, on the trip down to the city in the car, it’s breakneck speed all around you. You’re dealing with a lot of traffic, which is very stressful.”

Stories like this one make long-time Whistler homeowner Sidney Madden wistful for the days when B.C. Rail offered affordable, daily passenger rail service to Whistler year round — and she could travel to Whistler at a leisurely pace. “The journey was as much a part of the trip as the destination,” said the Vancouver resident, who has been tireless in contacting organizations from Vancouver, Squamish and Whistler about reinstating affordable passenger rail service to the resort. “Travelling by rail used to be affordable and convenient. Now if I want to take the train, I can’t do it during ski season, and it is prohibitively expensive.”

B.C. Rail ended its passenger rail service in October 2002 amid protest from municipalities throughout B.C., who considered the termination of the daily Cariboo Prospector service from North Vancouver to Prince George, with its stainless-steel Budd cars, like “cutting an artery to the North.” The subsequent $1 billion sale of B.C. Rail to CN in 2004 is still a contentious issue for many people.

The upscale rail service to which Madden is referring is the Whistler Mountaineer, which currently runs from early May to mid-October. Starting at $199 per person for a return ticket, the price point for this mode of transportation is beyond the budget of most locals. But even if the train fare were not an obstacle, the fact that the service does not run during ski season is baffling to people like Charles Hillman, who owned property at Alta Lake from 1965 to 1997.

Hillman fondly remembers taking the “ski train” from Ottawa to the Laurentian ski area of Huntsville in the 1930s. “Back then, train travel was a cent a mile,” he recalls. “I could get a return ticket for three dollars. People got onto the trains in the morning and arrived at their destinations, refreshed. At the end of the day, you were invigorated from trading ski stories with friends.”

Hillman laments the fact that North America is now so car-oriented. “One of the reasons you do a sport is for the camaraderie,” he said. “Driving up to Whistler can be lonely and dangerous. To have the train back as a social part of skiing life would be tremendous.”

Dave Steers, a ski buyer for Can-Ski, sees a stark contrast between ski transportation in the Sea to Sky corridor with that of other ski resorts. “In Europe, you see people getting on the ski trains in the morning with their ski boots already on,” he said. Even in Canada, world-class ski resorts came into being because of the trains. “That’s why places like Banff and Lake Louise exist. They were right on the train route.”

Here in Whistler, Steers acknowledged that skiers never took to the train in a big way. One of the reasons may have been that “the train dumped you in Creekside, away from the action in the village.” There were numerous attempts to get more skiers up to Whistler by train, though some of the efforts were somewhat dubious. “They ran disco trains back in the ’70s,” Steers recalls.

Louise Lundy, president of the Whistler Chamber of Commerce, admits that getting regular year round passenger rail service to Whistler is “not on our radar screen,” but is quick to add that the chamber would welcome the addition of such a service to add to Whistler’s transportation options. “I used to ride the train to Whistler from North Vancouver to ski,” she remembers. “It was a wonderful form of transportation; relaxing with great scenery.” But Lundy is aware of the financial obstacles to operating passenger rail service. “There has to be a business model,” she said. “I don’t think B.C. taxpayers want to subsidize another form of transportation to Whistler.”

Lundy recognizes that the current rail service operated by Rocky Mountaineer Vacations is not aimed at commuters. “Their packages and scheduling are definitely geared to the tourist market.”

Ian Robertson, Executive Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs for Rocky Mountaineer Vacations in Vancouver, considers the fares on the Whistler Mountaineer service fairly priced. “We have done our research and it doesn’t make a difference if you have 20 guests traveling on the train or 220 guests: our fuel costs are the same,” he said. “We also have to pay a fee to CN to operate on their route.”

VIA Rail passenger service, which connects major Canadian centres on a generally east-west route, is heavily subsidized by the federal government. Rocky Mountaineer works on a different model. “We are a private company,” Robertson said. “We don’t receive those subsidies.”

Robertson said the company is interested in expanding the scheduling of the Whistler Mountaineer to better serve the ski community. “Our goal is to expand to year-round service — running our equipment for only six months of the year is not effective,” he admitted. “We are considering the possibility of running trains to coincide with special events in Whistler, such as the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival in April. But year-round service is not feasible for us right now.”

One would think that with the thousands of tourists who will descend on Vancouver and Whistler for the 2010 Olympics, having an alternative form of transportation to North America’s number-one ski destination would be a priority. With maintained rail infrastructure already in place and the environmental advantages of train travel over car travel, train travel for the Olympics would seem to be a given. One of the tenets of VANOC is making the Games as environmentally sustainable as possible. Does expanding the highway to four lanes, and using motor coaches to ferry people up and down the corridor fit the bill?

But an alternative to highway travel is not necessarily in the cards, judging from the limited information available from VANOC.

We are committed to making public transportation during the 2010 Winter Games convenient, affordable, and in keeping with our commitment to environmental sustainability,” said Maureen Douglas, VANOC’s Director of Community Relations, through an e-mail.

We are applying the best practices of past Games organizers, who put together transportation plans that were not only efficient and user-friendly for spectators, but were also a positive part of their overall Olympic experience — part of the fun,” the statement continued.

VANOC’s transportation communication subcommittee will “begin sharing high-level transportation information to the public in early 2008…”

But in a 2006 article in Business In Vancouver, editor Tim Renshaw criticized VANOC for not placing more emphasis on moving tourists via train, whether they be travelling to Vancouver from Seattle, or from Vancouver to Whistler. Citing the millions of dollars that have been sunk into Washington State’s passenger rail transportation systems in recent years, Renshaw is dumbfounded by the B.C. Liberals’ decision to “kill” mandatory passenger service on B.C. Rail, considering accidents on the Sea to Sky Highway “routinely bring traffic to a halt in both directions.”

While many in both Vancouver and Whistler (and beyond Whistler from Pemberton to Lillooet) would welcome a return of the passenger rail service, Robertson of Rocky Mountaineer Vacations said as far as ski traffic is concerned, “our research shows that skiers want to get to the mountain as quickly as possible and start skiing. To get to Whistler quickly, they would rather take a limo or taxi directly from the airport. They don’t want to waste a day on travel.”

With its steep terrain and sharp curves, the North Vancouver to Whistler journey that takes 1.5 to two hours by car, takes three hours on the train. “Transport Canada regulates how quickly we can travel on the rail lines,” Robertson added. So a French TGV-style bullet train is not in the cards? “There would have to be a billion dollars worth of upgrades to straighten the tracks,” Robertson explained.

The average speed of the North Vancouver to Whistler trip is about 50 km/h, not exactly the TGV.

“Our rail service is simply not quick enough for the average day skier,” Robertson said. “As wonderful as the scenery is, skiers want to get there faster.”

Robertson continued: “We have focused on the tourism niche. Companies like Greyhound, and other motor coach companies, satisfy the demand for efficient point-to-point transportation. Our focus is on creating the experience.”

Don Evans of the West Coast Railway Association, which runs the Railway Heritage Park in Squamish, concurs with Robertson’s views. “We support passenger rail service in this province but only if it makes good business sense,” he said. “The North Vancouver to Whistler trip is a fabulous ride from a scenery/tourism perspective but it is not that efficient from a transportation perspective. The elevation through the Cheakamus Canyon area, for example, means the train really cannot travel at speeds that commuters would like.”

Mike Duggan, general manager of the soon-to-be-opened Nita Lake Lodge, would welcome year-round passenger rail service, which is not surprising, given the proximity of the lodge to the new Whistler train station. But like Robertson, he believes that skiers who arrive in Vancouver first thing in the morning want to “get on the mountain” as soon as possible.

“After five or six days of skiing, their legs are tired. That is when a return trip to Vancouver on the train, to enjoy the scenery, would be a good option,” Duggan said.

Why is it that Canadians enjoy extensive and heavily subsidized passenger rail service in provinces like Quebec and Ontario, while British Columbians were denied access to this mode of transport after 2002? According to Catherine Kaloutsky, senior officer of Media and Corporate Communications for VIA Rail Canada, VIA Rail has never operated intra-provincially in B.C., which was always the domain of provincially owned B.C. Rail. The decision to cut subsidies to passenger rail service in the 1990s was a provincial decision, not a federal one, she emphasized.

So if the provincial government cut passenger rail subsidies back in the ’90s, citing lack of funds, shouldn’t the federal government step in to reinstate the service? “It doesn’t make good business sense,” said B.C. Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon in an interview. “We don’t want to go to the federal government asking for money unless we have done our homework. The simple fact is that we don’t have the population base to support rail service.

“Our studies concluded that passenger rail service to Whistler would have a very high cost and low ridership,” Falcon continued. “The cost would be $1,000 per person, per return trip, after upgrades to the tracks. That is not a good use of taxpayer dollars.

“One of the things we are doing to improve transportation in the region is by expanding the TransLink system from Pemberton to Hope,” Falcon said. “Through that, we hope to provide better transportation options. I am not saying that passenger rail service won’t ever happen in the future — it depends on the growth of the region — but that day is not here yet.”

One of the B.C. Ministry of Transportation-commissioned studies that Falcon is referring to is a January 2002 Sea to Sky Corridor Travel Demand Study, which concluded that passenger rail options, both by increasing passenger service and making infrastructure improvements to reduce travel rail time, would “require significant public subsidies” and would therefore “not be a viable option.” Nine months after that study was published, B.C. Rail passenger service came to a grinding halt.

Public swimming pools, no matter how heavily used, operate at losses to a community, financially speaking. Does this mean they should not be operated for the benefit of the community at large? When passenger rail service was cut in October 2002, the provincial government cited annual losses of $5 million per year, despite the fact that the Cariboo Prospector tallied 81,000 one-way trips in 2001. The benefits to the communities that were served by passenger rail service were far-reaching, and for some rural British Columbians, the train was their sole access to larger service centres.

Sidney Madden believes year-round, affordable passenger rail service falls into that essential service category, as well as being a wonderful way to enjoy the ride.

“Too many silly buggers are racing up the highway saying, ‘I’ve got to get there, I’ve got to get there,’” said Charles Hillman. “With the train, the journey itself is half the fun.”



Comments