by Matthew Bentley - As a regular reader of your website and I have both emailed you before and left a number of comments on the blog. Your most recent article mentions the extra GO trains planned for Kitchener.
Sadly this won't come soon enough for me. I'm coming over to Canada again for a holiday this coming Monday (27th) for just over two weeks.
I'll be staying in Toronto, Kingston, Smiths Falls, London and Windsor. I had intended to take a day trip between Toronto and Kitchener. Sadly the limited service offered by both GO and Via makes this very difficult. I also wanted to travel to Sarnia. Again Via's poor frequency doesn't make this an easy option. I shall probably have a day out to Niagara Falls. However,
I've only been able to find out the GO train schedule within the last 2 or 3 weeks. That's not very helpful when trying to plan a holiday in advance. I can't believe that GO are unable to get their timetable out sooner, if you ask me that's very poor planning and communication. Add to that the service isn't very frequent. Surely such a popular tourist destination should have much more than just one Amtrak train in either direction, and a very limited GO service.
The article mentions running a higher frequency service between Kitchener and Toronto by around 2024. In my opinion this is something that should be happening a lot sooner than that. It's just so frustrating that improvements to train services seem to take so long in Canada. I feel that the present Canadian Government needs to get a grip, and start pushing things forward a lot quicker. I've not heard any more about their plans for High Speed Rail.
They also don't seem to be taking any action when it comes to getting large cities such as Calgary, Regina, Sherbrooke and Saint John back on the passenger rail map. Trudeau and his team need to wake up fast. Amtrak have had rising passenger numbers for around ten years now, surely they can't be proud of the fact that Via are badly lagging behind them ?
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