cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/403518
Freight trolleys in the back, passenger trolleys in the front.
@TheEnigmaBlade
@canada
With only passenger cars, the train can speed up and slow down quickly. If you chain hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cargo to it, doing station stops would require slowing down many minutes in advance, and speeding up would take much longer to get up to speed.And just in general, passenger trains go significantly faster with different stop patterns. I’ve ridden the Cascades line that has its northern terminus in Vancouver, B.C. a lot. It comes to a full stop for all of maybe two minutes at the smaller stops, whereas freight takes large periods of time.
They don’t want to.
CP and CN are Canada’s largest freight carriers, which are privately owned. They see VIA as nothing but a burden on their highly efficient, well oiled freight machine (can you feel the sarcasm in my words? seriously, fuck them both). They refuse to even let VIA run on the vast majority of their tracks, going as far as to remove tracks they no longer and making the infrastructure as passenger service unfriendly as possible to discourage VIA from getting any ideas, what makes you think they’d, A, let VIA directly compete with them with their own freight service, or 2, let VIA stick their carriages on their freight trains?
@TheEnigmaBlade because its efficient for cargo, for people cars or planes are better