A story this past week caused a lot of discussion in the newsroom at the Citizen.
It caused a lot of discussion among our readers, too, which was why I asked reporter Sarah Simpson to write a follow-up story on the push by a new pro-rail corridor group to get things moving to rehabilitate the line, and what you guys were saying about it.
We’ve all been covering the rail corridor since the birth of the Island Corridor Foundation. We’ve seen the ups and downs, from jubilation at the partners acquiring the railroad, to frustration at seeing the infrastructure deteriorate to the point where the trains can no longer run on the track, with our federal and provincial governments seemingly indifferent to the loss, in spite of lip service to green transportation and the need to encourage more public transit.
We’re all proponents of the train, or at least we have been in the past. One of the reporters has seen his enthusiasm wane, he told us this week, as the process to try to get the trains going again has dragged on and on, year after year, with more and more of the track disintegrating every day.
I imagine he represents a pretty substantial group out there, something that I think is incredibly sad. It’s like the rail opponents have won by attrition, just eroding support day by day as people become convinced, as my reporter is, that it’s a losing battle. Oh, and the more time that passes, the more it will cost to fix it (true enough).
It baffles me that people don’t see the potential of having a working train connecting the Island. Our population here is growing, and specifically, our seniors population is growing. More public transit will be in demand as they age out of being able to drive.
People travelling in individual cars is also an incredibly inefficient way to move folks from one place to another, to say nothing of the environmental cost. And there’s the fiscal cost of building, expanding and maintaining highways. Not cheap.
Will it be expensive to bring the rail line up to snuff? Absolutely. Should we do it? Again, absolutely.
We have to be forward thinking on this file. Once the corridor is gone, we will never have another chance to build anything of the kind again. It’s now or never.
Which brings me back to the newsroom discussion. It seems clear that we’ve got to see movement soon on upgrading the corridor and getting the trains running again or risk losing support person by person. It seems odd that we haven’t to date been able to translate the obvious passion for the issue into progress.
Here’s hoping for more in the near future.
