Group works on Boston train
A group is working on creating a night train to Boston that would take 14 hours, taking a long route via Sherbrooke and Portland, Maine.
(Scrolling through Gazette stories now means picking out small pieces of text sandwiched between massive ads. They really, really want us to buy cars. Big cars.)
MarcG 08:39 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
Great idea, trains are awesome. (For the ads, do a search for “ublock origin” and install the browser extension – 99.9% of ads are gone, even the ones before YouTube videos.)
Daniel D 09:24 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
If they’re going to invest in upgrading the line between Montreal and Sherbrooke, I’d really like to see them supplement the overnight service with an hourly or two hourly regional shuttle just serving the stops in Quebec.
MarcG 09:39 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
“Pepin said the train would run between Montreal’s Central Station and Sherbrooke several times a day”
Tim 09:56 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
No thanks for a 14 hour train ride with one-way fares of $200 that is contingent on track upgrades through federal dollars.
You can drive (your own car or a rented car) to Boston in about 6 hours and most of the time is spent on empty, divided highways through Vermont or New Hampshire. I have done it many times, the scenery is great and I find the drive relaxing. As a comparison, Toronto is about the same distance yet I find that drive much more stressful due to the volume of traffic and trucks on the 401.
Daniel D 12:37 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
Not everyone can or wants to drive though, so let’s not throw this proposal in the bin just yet. Alternatives are a good thing, although I do agree it’s going to be hard to compete with driving and flying based on time. A problem with rail in general in North America.
MarcG: I missed that! It’s good they’re thinking about these kinds of things up front.
Thomas H 13:54 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
I am a huge railfan and would love nothing more than a future where every major North American city is connected by high or higher speed rail. But the need for better connectedness for people who cannot or do not want to drive is very urgent. We need a lower carbon, easy to use, frequent, high-quality bus system.
My partner wants to see his family in Toronto soon and we would prefer not to drive our aging vehicle for gas price and carbon emissions reasons. It would cost $400 round trip for us to do this on VIA Rail, even with a few months notice. That’s a non-starter for us; we are young and our income is modest.
I had the great pleasure of experiencing the coach bus system in Mexico three years ago and was blown away by the frequency, comfort, and ease of the experience. Reliable wifi, comfortable seats, and even a meal service. There were 3 different classes of seat, like an airplane (first, business, economy), but even our cheap seats were by far and away the best coach experience of my life. Best of all, buses left major terminals to nearly every destination every 20-60 minutes, so we walked into bus stations without pre-planning and knew we’d be on the road in no time. This level of “not needing to plan my life months ahead of time” was the key aspect that matched the convenience of driving.
We can’t re-do our infrastructure mistakes overnight. But sometimes I see a flashy rail proposal and I can’t help but feel a sinking feeling that we’re doing it all wrong. A very large share of the population will happily hop on a coach bus instead of driving if the experience gave us some modest dignity and comfort. In fact, we’d prefer it. Sometimes I feel like the planners that propose major infrastructure projects are completely out of touch with the needs and preferences of not only the most marginalized, but also the average working citizen with various obligations and non-infinite financial resources. They’re well-paid, well-travelled engineers and business people who have taken the Eurostar or night trains in Europe, and perhaps they assume that’s the only way people would ditch their cars (because it’s the only way THEY would). But it’s simpler than that. Give me an affordable, comfortable, frequent bus, and I will take it.
Joey 15:02 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
What Thomas H said.
It’s extremely frustrating that the only lens that metters for assessing any public transit investment (light rail, buses, metros, bike-sharing, car-sharing, express bike lanes, etc) is what impact it will have on our collective driving habit – will it get people out of cars? Will it annoy people in cars? What about parking? There is, obviously, real value in creating options for drivers to reduce their driving (and, again obviously, this is a critical objective). But there are many benefits to investments in better mobility that have nothing to do with cars: will a new bus route enable people to get around quickly outside of rush hour? Will new buses be comfortable during heat waves? Will more riders be able to sit if we up metro frequency? Are we creating redundancy given how often bus/metro/train service is disrupted? And yet all the oxygen is consumed by hypothetial arguments about snowflake car drivers.
Anyway, a 14-hour overnight bus to Boston (3X the length of a car trip) seems like a non-starter.
Blork 16:45 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
Tangent: I find both the Gazette and CTV’s web sites (as well as many others) essentially unusable, especially on a tablet or phone. Not only are the ads overwhelming, but they are constantly refreshing with different sized ads, which cases the page to jump as the flow adjusts.
I. just. cannot.
Does anyone know if Gazette subscribers also get those ads, or does subscribing remove them (or at least lighten the load)?
Blork 16:57 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
Yeah 14 hours is long. If it was 10 hours or even 12, but you were assured of comfort, then maybe.
Eons ago I used to take “The Ocean” to Halifax on occasion; it left Montreal at something like 8:00PM and arrived in Halifax around noon the next day I think. The evening hours were quite pleasant, but the last two or three hours really dragged. You’re awake, you’re close, but it just goes on and on.
14 hours overnight also means you miss most of the scenery, for whatever that’s worth. And Old Orchard Beach is just over 2/3 of the way, so what time would you arrive? 6:00AM? WTF are you going to do in Old Orchard Beach at 6:00AM with all your luggage? (Most hotels won’t let you in until after lunch.) I remember arriving in Paris one time on an overnight flight; got into the city at about 7:00AM, which was sort of magical, but the hotel wouldn’t give us our room until 1:00PM. At least they stowed our bags so we could walk around, but I don’t sleep on planes so I was exhausted. By 11:00AM we were back at the hotel, ready to collapse, and we had to sit there for almost two hours — felt like the longest two hours of my life.
Anyway, I love rail travel and I really miss it. But I don’t see how this idea can work.
Poutine Pundit 19:56 on 2022-08-26 Permalink
Montreal to Boston is roughly the same distance as Paris to Lyon.
The Paris-Lyon TGV takes 2 hours.
This is the type of rail transport we should be dreaming of and pushing for, ideally with streamlined border procedures at departure, not a clunky and slow 14-hour overnight train.
dhomas 10:57 on 2022-08-27 Permalink
I’m with Poutine Pundit in this one. The problem is that we’re propping up the air travel industry because “jobs”. You can get a return flight from Montreal to Boston for about 300 bucks, with at least 3 departures daily. That’s less than it would cost in gas for one person and it’s a less than 90 minute flight. In France, they’ve banned (or are in the process of banning) domestic flights less than 2 hours long where rail is an alternative. We would need to do something similar where we commit to a TGV with a hard stop to air travel once the fast train is built. It’s difficult for Montreal to Boston because there are two countries involved, but we could start with the Quebec City – Windsor corridor (we’d have to see how we can do that now that the REM has blocked access to the Mount-Royal tunnel). I much prefer rail travel to air travel as it’s a much more comfortable way to travel on top of the environmental benefits, but 14 hours versus 90 minutes is a hard sell.
PatrickC 12:45 on 2022-08-27 Permalink
@Blork, yes, Gazette subscribers get the pop-up autoplay videos. I’ve had a digital subscription for years, but the unpleasant user experience on top of the thinness of the content will probably make me not renew my subscription. Funny how when you get reader surveys from Postmedia they never ask you about anything these issues.