Why Canadians don’t ride trains anymore

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Railroads were foundational to Canada’s early growth and prosperity. Up until the 1950s, practically all mid-sized towns were connected to a rail network. But as Tristin Hopper explains, trains may be vulnerable to the same fate as the horses it replaced.

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Watch the video or read the transcript below.

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If you spend any time with a transportation engineer or urban planner, they’ll inevitably tell you that Canada needs a lot more trains.

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Intercity rail is more efficient than freeways or air travel. Urban cores are better served by streetcars and light-rail than by streets clogged with idling cars.

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All of which is obviously true. A train uses less fuel, carries way more people, and is an exponentially more efficient use of materials.

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That’s a big part of why Canada used to be an extremely railed country. The only country on earth that arguably owes its entire existence to a railroad.

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Right up until the 1950s, you could take a train to almost every mid-sized settlement on the Canadian map.

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Once in those cities, you got around on streetcars. Even in very small cities like Cornwall, Ont. or Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, you had surprisingly extensive networks of electric trams.

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As to why all of this ended, I’m afraid the answer is that riding trains — all else being equal — kind of sucked.

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It was far superior to what it replaced — walking or canoeing or riding a horse. But by modern standards it’s slow, uncomfortable and inconvenient.

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And it’s why, if you look at what caused Canadians to abandon rail travel en masse, the answer is that they usually did it as soon as they could afford to.

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They stopped riding trams as soon as they could afford cars, and they stopped riding intercity passenger rail as soon as they could afford airplane tickets.

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All of which was well-acknowledged at the time.

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Starting in 1959, the Government of Canada convened a royal commission to investigate why passenger rail ridership was dropping off a cliff.

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Representatives from the Canadian Pacific Railway showed up and told the commission that it was simple; nobody wanted to ride trains anymore.

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Quote, “with the increased use of automobiles, the convenience and frequency of bus travel, and technology in the air industry lowering the cost per seat-mile of air travel, it is impossible to forecast a resurgence of effective demand for rail passenger services,” they said.

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The main reason passenger rail continued at all is because this was when the government started subsidizing it.

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And it wasn’t just Canada. Australians experienced this trend. So did Americans. So did New Zealanders. Even in Europe, whose small size and high population density kept train travel popular, it’s the rare European rail network that isn’t smaller than it was before the advent of cars and air travel.