Instead of getting my New Year's cards out, I've been going through back issues of Rail Travel News trying to pin down the evolution and politics of the VIA service in the western provinces between 1981 and 1985. I'm missing a few issues (or they are misfiled).
Some background for American readers -- the governing party under Pierre Trudeau only had two seats in Manitoba and none west of there, so no matter whether the 1981 cutbacks were justified or not, it looked really bad. The other important political issue affecting public reaction was that the traditional role of the Canadian Transport Commission was still legally in effect, so it was bypassed. No public hearings were held. The regional vice-president for VIA Rail Quebec stated that the executive order was necessary because the CTC would not consider the budgetary impacts (see quote in the article below).
So, the changes went into effect as planned, reported in RTN 235. The reason that the Skeena inaugural run departed EDMO late was because the CN had not issued train orders for it.
Note regarding VIA West veep Harold Murray's threat to resign -- he was a protege of VIA President Frank Roberts from their days working for CN in the Maritime region. This came out in the South Edmonton-Calgary train-off hearings.
VIA took steps to ameliorate the problems, but none of this happened on Day One. 20 seats were blocked out for Skeena connecting passengers between Prince George and North Vancouver. (I can't find the info on it, but as I recall, one of the tri-weekly days was shifted to connect less poorly in Prince George from one tri-weekly train to the other.) A chartered bus was put on from EDMO to Train 1 and from Train 2, as described below. It was started too late for Christmas bookings. The Canadian had cars added to it. In peak periods it had 18 cars east of Calgary and 20 cars west of the Stampede city. The South Edmonton-Calgary trains, which did not run Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings, had those gaps filled in. A second RDC was added to the morning northbound / evening southbound Alberta Corridor train that connected from Train 1 and to Train 2. On July 1, 1983 VIA introduced snack service on the RDC trains and contracted with Yellow Cab for van service between EDMO and South Edmonton.
Still , all of this was a patch-up. A passenger who had planned a trip to Jasper from Ottawa in a through sleeper or coach now had to change at Sudbury, Calgary, South Edmonton, and EDMO.
Next - Jasper businesses, the mayor of Melville, and a change in Ottawa.
1982 was spent by VIA in trying to make the 1981 Pepin plan work. It was spent by the travel industry trying to find substitutes. And it was a period when rail advocates linked up with community leaders and politicians.
In 1982, VIA's "highway cruiser" added to EDMO-Calgary service for EDMO-VCVR travel. While connections through Calgary and EDMO for the
Skeena worked to and from the east, this bus for connections to and from the west via the
Canadian left EDMO before the Skeena arrived and returned to EDMO after the Skeena left.
There were various estimates of the lost business in Jasper due to cancellations. $5 million was the lowest, and no one knew how much could be lost in future years. I had worked on setting up Japanese tourism by rail in the Canadian Rockies, and knew that their retailers liked to get in a groove for tours with reliable results. And as their main port of entry was Vancouver, not Prince Rupert, the sudden loss of capacity would be discouraging.
Far to the east, cities along the CN main line between Winnipeg and Saskatoon were outraged by the diversion of service to the CP main line already served by the
Canadian. In that region of multiple rail lines and highways, the CN served one set of towns and Greyhound Lines of Canada served a different set of towns.
Leadership in that stretch was provided by Melville's mayor. Melville was a major junction and (I believe) a division point on the CN, so he had multiple motives for the campaign. He was given an advantage by the fact that the Pepin plan's route via Regina was longer than the route via Melville and playing tag with the Canadian between Winnipeg and Regina did not generate much traffic.
In mid-1982, Mayor Don Abel contacted me before he journeyed west to meet with allies. Alberta Transport 2000 was active with Saskatchewan Transport 2000. I don't recall how he got in touch with me, but I think that other advocates weren't available in that summer. He wanted to discuss alternative service plans. VIA had replaced the EDMO-SASK RDC train with a locomotive-powered train, but there was still a dead-end schedule at Saskatoon. The trains were parked overnight. Couldn't there be something better?
In early 1984, the replacement for RDC's departs EDMO for a night in Saskatoon.
At my work as Marketing Officer for Edmonton Transit we had recently bought a $50,000 CompuGraphic typesetter. My desktop computer probably has more capacity than it had, but at the time it was state of the art. And it came with ten (yes, 10) type fonts. We had chosen nine fonts that fit with our graphic identity. I liked the font that VIA used, so I had chosen it as the tenth.
With some after-hours learning on the keyboard, I typed out a counterfeit VIA timetable to try out on the mayor when he visited Edmonton. In reading about Melville, I learned that the Grand Trunk Pacific main line through there had run Winnipeg-Prince Rupert. VIA was running that in pieces. Several of the problems that hobbled the Pepin plan could be solved by reviving that idea. When I first visited Edmonton in 1967, CN had a secondary transcontinental named
Panorama. I had noticed VIA's and CN's modern preference for train names that worked in both official languages, so I typed in Panorama. I also typed up a train named
Courier/Coureur, as in
coureurs de bois, for Winnipeg-Toronto on the CN.
Next: the mayor of Melville arrives in a "limousine."
