VIA Rail Canada Venture fleet

[williamn]

I recently travelled from Montreal to Toronto and was surprised that my service, as well as several others, was being operated by the old LRC equipment, which true to its ‘Light Rapid Comfortable name is still very comfortable, if no longer rapid.

What’s up with the Venture fleet though? I thought the full roll out had already been completed?

 

[k-c-p]

VIA is at odds with Canadian National (CN) which owns most of the tracks VIA runs on. In autumn of 2024 CN imposed a minimum 32 axle requirement for certain routes citing issue with level crossings as the reason. The Venture trainsets do not meet the requirement (the have 24 axles irrc) and are therefore subject to massive speed restrictions resulting in delays, burden in the staff and replacement of Venture trains with legacy (LRC/HEP) stock. VIA and CN are battling this out in a Quebec court with no end in sight.

The blog Trackside Treasure covers the whole Venture undertaking/saga in various posts. This post covers the latest incidents surrounding the Ventures and has links to 30+ previous posts on the subject.

 

[williamn]

Jeez..what a mess. I forget the terminology used for this on the train but our LRC set kept having to stop at crossings for them to be manually operated by the crew, with us crawling through, and stopping again the other side.

The only placed I've experienced this other on a heritage line was on a train from Pembroke Dock to Tenby back in the 90's!

 

[k-c-p]

The whole Venture introduction was plagued by issues: As they are a lot lighter than the other stock, there where issues with track circuits recognising the trains (Amtrak has has similar issues with new Siemens rolling stock on CN routes). During the Winter Ventures broke down due to snow, humidity creeping into the electronics compartments (iirc is Siemens is still working on this). There were several break down due to breaks on trains getting stuck or locos shutting down completely. This combined with dismal VIA crisis management let to some cases where passenger were stuck for hours (this gut VIA a "nice" talking-to from the Transport Minister).

The issues might hinder VIA from retiring the legacy stock from the Corridor services as they plan to do (until mid-2027?). I think the Renaissance (the stock originally intended for the Channel Tunnel) is gone from the Corridor trains and is used exclusively on The Ocean, but HEP and LRC still see regular usage on the Corridor.