(03-09-2022, 10:07 PM)plam Wrote: And I wanted to reiterate ac3r's point that there is rail service to surprisingly small towns in Europe. It would be really nice to have that here. (But no, I don't think we have the political support for it).
The sad thing is, we used to have it! One can map all the abandoned railway lines on OpenRailwayMap or Google search old rail maps just to see how many small towns had rail lines. Many of these were freight because back then because we didn't have large trucks to ship goods, but they often ran small passenger trains as well since most people didn't have the means to easily travel. Trains connected Fort Erie to Wiarton, Pembroke to Sarnia etc.
Then it all just disappeared. It's a shame because. If we look at Great Britain, they still have nearly 16'000 kilometers of rail that gets used each day, with a ridership of nearly 2 billion. They still have cars and roads, but they use trains a lot. Their rail indeed connects not only cities, but towns and tiny villages. Many stops get used so infrequently that you have to manually request the stop, but those places are still connected nonetheless (Geoff Marshall has a great video series on these "request stops" which you can watch here). Canada differs due to its sheer size so the track length is greater, obviously, but either way our rail ridership is a dismal 101 million. That number includes commuter rail riders, which make up the vast majority of rail ridership here since few people travel cross country by train anymore.
I'd love to see rail get improved in this province and country though I truly doubt it ever will have a renaissance for a long time. Roads are just so expensive to maintain (trains are too, of course). Cars and trucks are expensive to maintain. It's terrible for the environment with things like pollution and the destruction of forests, wetlands etc. Road and highway construction costs a fortune since it needs so much concrete, steel, pipes, signs, lighting, police patrols, preventative maintenance and so on. We have to constantly repave them with bitumen, much of which we now get out of the tar sands out west so it's terrible for the environment. Trains are much simpler in terms of construction, operation and maintenance.