Why Canada is so far behind Europe in electrifying rail
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-canada-trains-europe-electric-1.6450892
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-canada-trains-europe-electric-1.6450892
So the reality is a bit more complicated than “big sparse country”. Freight railroads don’t really care about population density, just distance and operating margins. It comes down to who owns the rails and their motivations.
A big capital investment like electrification is actually extremely profitable long term. Over 30-40 years it would save a class 1 railroad about 25% of their operating expenses for fuel and maintenance (diesel-electric units are complex high maintenance systems compared to big-ass AC motors). Even when factoring in debt servicing over that period it’s still a large overall win.
The problem is that a big investment like that isn’t attractive to CN or CPKC, because they’re mainly concerned with positive quarterly reports. It’s the same reason our tracks are so shabby, it’s not that they can’t afford to it’s that their motivation is to move freight for the absolute lowest cost, speed and reliability be damned.
In Europe & Asia the infrastructure is commonly owned by a state corporation, and they’re generally more willing to take on big projects like that so they can get more revenue from the train operators themselves. More passengers and higher speed = more tax revenue. The incentives are just different in that situation
Another fun fact… if you were to add up the bonuses, dividends, buybacks, and dumb vanity projects (CN Tower) in the past half-century, they’ve already blown through more than double what it would cost to electrify and upgrade the most serviced trackage in the country. Instead we made some old guys obscenely wealthy.
In Europe & Asia the infrastructure is commonly owned by a state corporation
It's almost as if hocking every asset wasn't such a good idea after all. Who knew?!
(I mean, other than every progressive economist and policymaker...)
Because Canada is really big and mostly empty.
I didn't even need to read the article to figure that out. I just looked at a map.
It really seems like Canada and america are simply too stupid to build infrastructure that doesn't suck. You just don't put anything in the empty spaces apart from a fast line connecting bigger groupings of cities, and within the cities add skytrain track like greater vancouver but have tracks to all the areas that are currently realistically only accessible by car. So many transit commutes require overshooting and bussing back, and I have worked or know people that have worked jobs with start and finish times that never line up with transit and require leaving early and waiting up to an hour and a half, or being late by nearly as much.
We really need it with how rush hour is continually getting worse. My local rush hour has gone from 5:30pm-6:30pm when I first started driving, to 2:00pm-7:30pm now. I'm so done with 2 hours of unpaid driving every day, especially now that it doesn't even save me time over transit. I also know several people that are 'ultra pro-car' yet are too stupid to understand that getting people who don't even want to drive off the road will make driving better for the people that do want to drive.
In short I figure both canadians and americans are just too subservient to big auto and our other corporate overlords to not only make any meaningful attempt to implement any kind of non freight railways, but also anything that would make life better in general.