Written by William C. Vantuono, Editor-in-Chief, Railway Age Magazine; October 13, 2017
VIA Rail Canada set ridership records over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. From Oct. 5 to 10, 2017, 193,900 passengers used VIA’s four main services—Cross-Canada, Quebec-Windsor, the Montréal-Halifax Ocean and the Toronto-Vancouver Canadian—for an average 20.8% increase over the same period in 2016, excluding the Ocean, which rose 5%.
This gain was also reflected in revenues, which rose an average of 23.8% across all four services, compared to 2016. Passengers covered a total distance of more than 34 million kilometers (21 million miles) on the 367 Cross-Canada Services trains that operated in that time period. Oct. 6 was that service’s busiest day, as 20,900 people traveled on the national network, generating C$1.7 million in revenues, the most in a single day since 2009.
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