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They usually have one of the 3 HEP-I coaches with a galley you mentioned (8145-47), but that leaves them only one spare, so they will sometimes have to use a HEP-2 coach instead (because none of the other HEP-1 coaches has galleys)…

Intercity Maglevs (or any other technology inherently incomptible with legacy rail or HSR technology) may only ever make sense in either: 1) countries which are obscenely rich, yet have not yet built a significant legacy rail network, or 2) HSR corridors which have reached their capacity limit...

I would consider taking the Skeena between Jasper and Prince Rupert in one direction, as it‘s supposedly VIA‘s most underappreciated route…

Excessive delays have become drastically less epidemic since the timetable changes of July 2018 and April 2019, which lengthened the trip time and especially the turnaround time in Toronto, and you are now much much more likely to arrive early than late in Toronto or Vancouver. Nevertheless...

Indeed, track maintenance (or at least: inspection) requirements are less for tracks which are not used for passenger movements. Same reason why if a VIA train needs to be exceptionally turned in Ottawa (because of issues with the leading unit, if operated as a bidirectional trainset)...

Buffer cars have thankfully only been a thing for the 8 months between mid-October 2022 and mid-May 2023:

Unfortunately, the best hint we seem to have to date is a blurry photo in the second picture of this tweet (as discussed over on Groups.io):

Passenger revenues of the Canadian recovered 102.1% of direct operating costs in 2017 and cost-recovery has rebounded again post-Covid to 78.8% in 2022. This means that the train is very profitable during the summer season (April-October), when the overwhelming majority of passengers travel...

I was describing the function of these cars, not the quality of services, amenities (or views) offered on board of them…

For RM, which is basically a tourist bus on steel wheels, these all-seats Panorama cars are the only car passengers ever see from the inside, whereas for a rolling hotel like the Canadian, they only serve an auxiliary lounge-and-observation function, as the Sleeper cars themselves are the main...

Ontario Northland piggybacking on VIA’s order for another 3 shorter (3-car instead of 5-car) trainsets comes to mind as a model…

If you want to procure rolling stock for use on Canadian mainlines, it needs to adher to FRA/TC crashworthiness standards. No active production line in Europe, China or India produces night train rolling stock complying with these standards (as none of their regular customers requires them)...

For the purposes of fleet renewals, VIA is faced by the same constraints as Amtrak, not those “the rest of the world operates with”. Given that Tren Maya doesn’t (to the best of my knowledge) share tracks with freight and is not regulated by TC or the FRA, they are not bound to procuring...

3 sets (a fourth set was required in summer when the third weekly frequency operated, but it has last operated in 2019). Approximately 10 cars in winter and 20 cars in summer…

Again: VIA might need ready-to-deploy Sleeper cars which may act as a stopgap for a few years until the new fleet (hopefully) arrives, not another fleet of cars which first needs massive investments before it is available for service…

Acquiring sleeper cars second-hand from Amtrak is one thing, but completely rebuilding cars which have been discarded and were never built for North American specs is an extremely poor use of taxpayer money. Canada should focus on getting the RFP out and the contract signed as soon as possible...

No, and the CETA (Canada-EU Trade Agreement) forbids it to errect such trade barriers. However, its national regulator, Transport Canada, usually aligns with its American counterpart (FRA), which all but disqualifies designs from outside North America…

Exactly! As I wrote elsewhere: VIA would be stuck behind the queue of this and all other existing orders…

The deadline doesn’t seem to come from VIA, but from Transport Canada (Canada’s FRA) itself as the responsible regulator: https://groups.io/g/Canadian-Passenger-Rail/topic/commons_transport_committee/104341216?p=Created,,,20,1,20,0&jump=1 Note: I don’t necessarily trust whatever information...

As long as there are mandated routes west of Ontario, you’ll need a service which can shuffle the equipment between the maintenance centers and the Canadian is the most cost-effective way to achieve this. The Ocean, on the other hand, is much more vulnerable, but the restoration of the Gaspé...