VIA Rail

[danbrotherston]

I'm asking about revenue service, i.e., carrying paying passengers, not "testing". You said they are being "rolled out" which is unclear, but dtkvictim specifically said they're carrying passenger service.

I feel like even a non-railfan who rides via rail (do those even exist?) who was scheduled on a via train and a brand new modern European style Stadler train pulled up instead of Via's typical 1950s - 1970s fare would be taking a selfie with it and posting it on twitter. Certainly someone in a train with 500 people on it would be posting something.

I cannot believe Via would run passenger service without a launch, OTOH, it'd be great if they were that far along.

I think there was more confirmation of it in the UT thread, but again it's a nightmare to find anything there.

All I could quickly find was this video. The video claims they are on "one of the very first revenue runs", and the train seems to be displaying a regular route number.

Cool! Thanks! Yeah, I am surprised that there wasn't more press about them starting service. I feel like they'd want to talk about that more.

It's great news for me, there's some chance that the next time I visit, we might be on new trains--not that I'd choose Via if I had a choice, but this is certainly an improvement.

As a complete aside, does anyone know why trains move so slowly 1km from Union Station and what it would take to fix this? It takes nearly 5 minutes to go from "just arriving at Union" to "stopped at the platform". That kind of delay is insane, and doesn't happen at other stations I'm aware of.