Evidence of meeting #36 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 40th Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was via.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Louis Plamondon Bloc Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour, QC
Has CN expressed an interest in being a partner in such a large-scale project as, for example, the Quebec-Windsor corridor?
And aside from the federal government, other stakeholders have expressed an interest, including the mayor of Quebec City, who came out strongly in favour of the project, and the Premier of Quebec. Has your organization made contacts at this level, or has it had meetings with the two orders of government to discuss the project?
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
None that I am aware of, sir--none at what I would call the working level, people such as myself, in terms of developing any sort of project plan or outline of parameters of what it might look like. I'm sure there have been discussions at a high level in a general sense, because, as you say, there is considerable interest from provincial governments. Certainly the mayor of Quebec and the federal government have been very interested. So I expect there have been general discussions with our senior executive but nothing that I'm aware of in terms of developing how CN might participate in this. We're the freight guys, and there are other very competent passenger operators here in Canada who I am very sure would be interested in playing a leadership role in developing this type of project.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
Merci.
Thank you for coming today, Mr. Miller. I appreciate your comments.
I've been one of the ones on the study tour to the northeast corridor. I think you've really come up against our big decision on the study to determine whether we're going to recommend incrementalism in the system or the advancement of dedicated alliance. To understand that better and understand what incrementalism in the system would mean as the Amtrak planners are working.... Even incrementalism is very expensive, billions of dollars being invested in what appears to be relatively little increase in speed.
Having said that, they have also taken operational steps in terms of freight and passengers in giving the passenger the priority in the daytime. Do you have any priorities on your system now between Montreal and Toronto?
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
Certainly our obligation and our expectation is that we're going to run the passenger trains on time, and we're contractually incented to run them on time. So if they are late we'll do whatever we can to get them back on time.
That's not to say that every individual dispatch decision will always be passenger over freight. Sometimes it makes more sense for the fluidity of the overall network to get the freight train out of the way. But generally speaking we do our best to get the passenger trains the high clear signal to get them past the freight trains and not to be delayed by the freight trains.
You raised a very important point. We do not run all our freight at night. We run our freight on a fairly balanced schedule throughout the day, again recognizing we obviously try to avoid the heaviest passenger train times by schedule. But because of the nature of our operation, the fact that our trains are coming from long distances away, they are not all running at night, as I believe they do, as you probably learned, at that one little spot on the northeast corridor.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
I'm interested in this relationship between freight and passenger rail, and the future for freight in the corridor as well. If we're going to spend $50 billion on high-speed rail and ignore the requirements of freight.... To me, in a planning sense, we should be taking the trucks off the highways and putting them on rail. That would open up space on the highways for smaller vehicles. It would change the relationship.
What's the likelihood of the expansion of the freight section on this existing corridor over the next 20 years?
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
As I mentioned in a previous answer, we can add a lot of freight now. We can put more freight on each train, and we can certainly run more trains. It's a double-track network between Toronto and Montreal, and it's equipped with very high-capacity, single-track networks on both sides.
In terms of the public input for increasing freight, we're very happy to pay for capacity expansion of our own railroads or our own earnings in revenue, as we've shown over the past years. We've expanded, particularly in western Canada, due to the fact that that's where we've had a lot of the growth we've experienced. We've been very happy to make our own investments in longer sidings, and improve signalling and so on in that territory. If we ever got to the point where our capacity was constrained in eastern Canada, we'd be very happy to invest our own funds there as well.
NDP
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
It's a very interesting question. We're not time-competitive strictly between Toronto and Montreal. For conventional intermodal operation, where you take a truck off the road and put it on rail, you have to have a certain amount of running time and distance in order to run out the time and cost inefficiencies that you have at each terminal location. Then you have to look at where the freight is actually coming from and going to. From Oshawa to Cornwall, we're not going to be very competitive because we'd have to go from Cornwall back to.... Do you see what I mean?
The traffic we're competing for typically is a little bit of a longer haul, the Port of Halifax, the Maritimes-type business, and then the Quebec traffic typically is longer haul in the other direction.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
You talked about 400 level crossings that you'd have to deal with if you were going to do a dedicated line. You would bunch those, wouldn't you? You'd create a system of bunching them. Do you have any idea of how many overpasses you'd have to create in a system like that, with 400 level crossings?
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
I would say it would look something similar to what you see on the highways, where they've built collector roads and funnelled traffic to major collector locations, which become overpasses. It would be like on the 401, something in that order of magnitude.
No, I couldn't give you a count or a cost to do that.
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
You couldn't do it all in one season, certainly. It would be some number of years to do that.
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
When you look at incrementalism, wouldn't you be identifying specific areas to do that in, heavy traffic areas?
NDP
Dennis Bevington NDP Western Arctic, NT
There's a pattern you would follow to reduce accidents and to make that happen. In all likelihood, that's going to happen in the same fashion anyhow.
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
Yes. The challenge there, sir, is that our railroad--if we use Toronto to Montreal--was built in about 1855, so it severs a lot of land and there are a lot of crossings there that you'd have to pick up.
Conservative
Candice Bergen Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm going to be sharing my time with Mr. Jean.
When we began this study, we were looking at high-speed rail, and you've cited examples--Europe, Japan. We went to the U.S. anticipating we would see dedicated corridors being built and bullet trains on those dedicated corridors. That was not at all what we found. I think it was a very good experience, because I think economically we're a lot closer to what the U.S. is doing in terms of how much money we want to put into higher-speed rail and the demographics of our country.
You said you thought that the majority of lines in the U.S. were dedicated lines. I would tell you that was not what we found out. We were told the majority were shared lines with freight rail, and the only one that was a really, truly dedicated line with true high-speed rail was California.
Did I misunderstand you?
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
No doubt I didn't express myself well. The only high-speed rail in any significant way in the U.S. is in the northeast corridor. The majority, by far, of the northeast corridor is dedicated to passenger. There is a section of about 30 miles, from Perryville, Maryland, to Baltimore, that has a considerable amount of freight on it. There are very limited amounts of freight elsewhere in the corridor. Much of the northeast corridor has triple or in some cases four tracks. They keep the freight off to the side and focus their attention and maintenance on the two inside tracks for the high-speed trains. That's the only place they're really running.
You're absolutely right. Amtrak does run on freight lines. They typically run at 79 miles an hour, with the exception of those territories where they have cab signalling--I don't want to get technical here--which is a sort of rudimentary form of positive train control. They run at 90 miles per hour, I believe.
Conservative
Candice Bergen Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Right. Obviously, with this $8 billion the President is investing, the goal is to build a few more dedicated areas so that there can be higher speed in those areas.
Conservative
Candice Bergen Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Realistically, we have to look at that as an option. It is something on which we would need to cooperate, and we would need advice from people like you to find ways to make it a win-win scenario. If we were to decide that this would be the route we wanted to go, can you tell me what you think the top three priorities would be? For example, would it be finding areas where we can make those dedicated corridors so that there are effective linkages into cities so that passenger travel could quickly link up with other modes of transportation? Would it be crossings?
What would you say are the main priorities for us if we are to share the rail?
Chief Safety and Transportation Officer, Canadian National
The first priority would be safety. It would be how the freight and passenger operations interact with one another, and as you mentioned, the number of grade crossings you would have to deal with, trespass issues, and so on.
The second priority would be schedule maintainability. Again, how do the freight and passenger trains interact? How do they delay one another? What sorts of impacts do you see? Can those be mitigated, and if so, how?
The first step would be a major risk assessment. Everyone--locomotive engineers, track maintenance people, the people who do the actual work--would be brought together to do a detailed risk assessment. Transport Canada rail safety people, as well, would be at that table to work through that in great detail.
The other priority, if I may--I should have said this--is that you really have to define what it is you are looking for. Is it 110 miles per hour? That is one thing. Is it 125 miles per hour? That is quite different. As for 150 miles per hour, I just wouldn't go there in terms of a comingled operation. I would strongly recommend against doing that.
