"'This is a historic moment,' said Kitchener, Ontario, Councillor Jim Wideman. But Cambridge, Ontario, Mayor Doug Craig countered, 'This is a historic moment, but it depends on what side of the (Highway) 401 you live on ... What we really have is a Kitchener-Waterloo light rail plan.' Cambridge, southeast of the other two cities, would be served by bus under the plan."
"'The citizens of Cambridge are being shafted,' Craig said, suggesting his constituents were being relegated to second-class status. 'I am not sabotaging it,' he said of the project. 'Cambridge has a position that it wants to be treated fairly and equitably.' Craig believes Bus Rapid Transit could serve the region for the next 30 years at a lower cost."
"Ontario provincial funds are expected to pay 66% of the cost, but provincial Premier Dalton McGuinty said the legislature must agree the project is appropriate. The federal government has provided one-third funding for similar projects in the Greater Toronto Area, raising expectations that it would adopt a similar position for Waterloo."
http://www.railwayage.com//content/view/969/121/
"-- there's an easy way out of the impasse. That is, Toronto will submit, and Ottawa will approve, $300 million of capital projects which qualify for the federal program and which the city was going to do anyway. This will free up sufficient funds from Toronto's capital budget to complete the streetcar purchase. That would be a "win-win" for everyone. So why not just do it? Now."
"Transport Minister John Baird has urged Toronto to come up with a list of other infrastructure projects in a letter in which he drives a stake into the heart of the city's plans to get federal stimulus money for new streetcars. Baird, in a polite but blunt letter to Mayor David Miller, makes it clear that the city's wish for federal cash for new streetcars and a replacement carhouse doesn't qualify under Ottawa's Infrastructure Stimulus Fund".
In the end, the Toronto Transit Commission has proposed to fund the shortfall itself, deferring other capital projects until 2018 (!) according to a Canadian Press story in Le Droit (June 26th.) This goes before Toronto City Council for approval today.
But behind the happy words, is a department in turmoil, sparked in part by Ranger's retirement as a respected deputy minister.
Ranger was a by-the-book bureaucrat who fell victim to political impatience and a Conservative government frustrated with the pace of infrastructure spending, observers say. Unwilling to bend the rules, Ranger is retiring this month, leaving behind unhappy colleagues upset at being 'bullied' and 'pushed' by the Conservatives on the infrastructure file, they say".
"This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Ranger will be replaced by Yaprak Baltacioglu, now deputy minister of agriculture and agri-food".
After hearing tonight from Bill Therriault, chair of the City's multi-modal steering committee, City Council directed Chief Administrative Officer Joe Fratesi to contact major industries and identify their intentions for the Huron Central Railway-operated feeder line.
Fratesi will work to initiate a co-ordinated private-sector approach to saving the line while Mayor John Rowswell works with other affected communities.
The multi-modal steering committee will offer logistical support.
Therriault told councillors tonight that the committee has identified that rail line as being essential to the economic and environmental stability and growth of Northern Ontario.
It's also a key component of the City's multi-modal plan: the part that involves the planned transfer of goods from rail containers to be distributed by truck into the United States and Southern Ontario".
"Some of the local companies Fratesi says he will likely be talking to include Essar Steel Algoma, Domtar (Sault and Espanola), Boniferro Mill Works, Purvis Reload Centre, St. Marys Paper and Flakeboard. ... Fratesi and Rowswell have less than eight weeks until Huron Central plans to send its last train from the Sault to McKerrow. As reported earlier by SooToday.com, Genesse & Wyoming Inc., parent company of Huron Central, announced last week that the company will cease its freight operations from the Sault east to McKerrow by August 15. The company said operations from McKerrow to Sudbury will grind to a halt by October 31 and at least 20 jobs in the Sault will be lost".
Officials with some of the largest transit operators in North America were in Ottawa last week and told city transit and planning officials that a tunnel is just the answer to take buses out of the downtown core and relieve congestion.
David Morgan, assistant general manager of light-rail operations for New Jersey Transit, has been following Ottawa's LRT debate.
He said the only way the city can eliminate traffic pressure in the downtown is for transit to go under it.
If the city doesn't go that route, OC Transpo won't be able to maintain schedules and could start losing riders, he said.
'Without grade separation to get LRT vehicles off city streets and the downtown you won't have an efficient system,' Morgan said.
Morgan, along with light-rail transit operators from Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto, spoke at an all-day LRT technology forum hosted by the city Friday. The city recently finalized the route of its proposed 3.2-kilometre downtown transit tunnel, with three stations and an estimated cost of about $600 million".
Schepers had originally excluded Transport 2000 Canada President David Jeanes from the forum but relented the day before under pressure from another City official.
"This of course came after Canada's two national railways abandoned much of the Western grain-dependent branch-line system. According to a 2007 Transport Canada report on rail transportation, 29,304 kilometres of rail line have been "rationalized" in Canada since 1990. Another report notes that between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s, Canada lost 17 per cent of its branch-line network".
"After decades of doing nothing to stop the scrapping of branch-line infrastructure in this province, the Manitoba government finally stepped in to help the fledgling Boundary Trails Railway Company (BTRC) take over a set of tracks in southwestern Manitoba with a $615,000 forgivable loan this spring. The federal government was hot on its heels with another $1 million".
"'The discussions were very quick due to the nature of Air Canada's circumstances right now and the requirement for their pension moratorium,' said Katherine Thompson, local president of the union representing nearly 6,800 flight attendants. We certainly would have preferred that we had a full bargaining session in which to do so and an economic climate that isn't quite as dire as this one is, but we played the cards that were dealt and what was put in front of us'. The agreement with the Canadian Union of Public Employees on Monday means the cash-strapped airline has reached "cost-neutral" agreements with all of its unionized employees".
The emails, written between 2001 and 2005 by at least 15 key witnesses in the case, including Premier Gordon Campbell, several cabinet ministers and key staff, are either missing or irretrievable, a government lawyer told B.C. Supreme Court on Tuesday.
'We don't accept at face value that these things are a) lost; and b) if they have been lost in some sense that they're not recoverable,' Michael Bolton, lawyer for David Basi, said Tuesday".
"A federal safety official says in the wake of Washington's deadly subway accident that the country needs better crash-worthiness standards for rail cars. Debbie Hersman, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, said Tuesday that it had 'made recommendations to various entities,' including the metropolitan and federal government, to improve safety standards. Nine people were killed and scores of others were injured, some seriously, in the accident during Monday's rush hour in the nation's capital along a part of Metro system track that carries passengers from the District of Columbia into suburban Maryland".
Transport 2000 members in Ottawa have often commented that it is not making railcars into fortresses that will prevent accidents, pointing instead to the German Indusi system used on the O-Train as more effective in accident prevention than further withing railcars down with steel armour.
AP also reported: "The only other time in Metrorail's 33-year history that there were passenger fatalities was on Jan. 13, 1982, when three people died as a result of a derailment beneath downtown. That was a day of disaster in the capital: Shortly before the subway crash, an Air Florida plane slammed into the 14th Street Bridge immediately after takeoff from Washington National Airport across the Potomac River. The plane crash, during a severe snowstorm, killed 78 people".
After a slow start, bookings on the line are now very numerous and are up on those of previous years. The railway is now studying relocating the Hull (City of Gatineau) station nearer downtown at the Casino, opening a Chelsea station and redeveloping the Wakefield site which is now rather tired. Even the timbers lining the famed turntable's pit are rotting out in places, so this is welcome news.