Via Rail’s performance has gone from bad to worse — and it’s costing the
Cédryk Coderre was one of dozens of travellers left stranded on a Via Rail train for 10 hours earlier this year.
As the government-owned passenger railway struggled with a mechanical failure, passengers on board Train 622 on Aug. 31 were left hungry and thirsty and forced to contend with sometimes inoperable toilets that belched out foul odours.
Some irate passengers — frustrated after waiting for hours with little to eat beyond bagged pretzels — got combative with Via personnel on this Montreal-Quebec City trip, Coderre told a recent House of Commons committee studying the incident.
“It sounded like the staff had it rough with some of the passengers in the other cars,” Coderre said.
A frequent traveller both at home and abroad, Coderre told MPs he has experienced more plane and train delays here in Canada than anywhere else.
“Around the world, from what I’ve noticed, there are not really any delays compared with what we’re used to,” he said.
Some Via Rail passengers are demanding answers and accountability after they were stranded on a train from Montreal to Quebec City Saturday for 10 hours with a lack of food, water and access to toilets.
The Aug. 31 delay was a particularly egregious incident and the company’s CEO has said it doesn’t happen all that often — although passengers on one Via train famously faced an 18-hour delay in December 2022.
But the data shows that Via trains are often late — and the problem has gotten a lot worse.
Just 59 per cent of Via trains arrived on time last year, according to figures published in the company’s annual report.
That figure is lower than the company’s pre-COVID on-time performance — about 68 per cent of Via trains arrived at their scheduled times in 2019.
Via’s on-time performance last year was also an eye-popping 23 percentage points lower than its performance in 2013, when it was 82 per cent.
Via’s frequent delays cost passengers time and money and missed moments with friends, family and business associates.
The delays are also costing the railway millions of dollars in revenue because Via compensates passengers with travel credits for some delays that run an hour or more.
The railway paid out $1.7 million in travel credits last year, according to data provided by the company to CBC News. That’s up from $1.13 million in 2022.
Via’s 2023 on-time performance is even worse than Air Canada’s on-time rate of 63 per cent — which earned the airline the dubious distinction of placing last among the continent’s 10 largest airlines last year, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
And rail travellers — unlike air passengers who get bad service or face unreasonable delays…
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