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Profits started drying up when the Trans-Canada Highway was built immediately adjacent to the line (Crump said it burned his caboose to see public money being stuffed into a highway that was competing with his privately funded trains). At the same time, publicly funded airports were built to prop up the Crown-owned Trans-Canada Air Lines (now Air Canada), which was the expensive plaything of Liberal “minister of everything” C.D. Howe.

Photo by Robert Taylor/CC BY 2.0

As a result, the slender profitability of the CP and CN passenger trains evaporated.

Via was created in 1977 to relieve the two railways of the red ink being generated by the remaining passenger trains, which were being bludgeoned by heavy public spending on every mode of transportation — except trains. Politically hog tied from the outset, Via won back lost passengers, but at high cost, due to its lack of modernization. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government, which created Via, then knocked off a fifth of its trains in 1981.

On the 1984 campaign trail, the Mulroney Conservatives said they’d put it all back, promising to “create a public excitement about going by train.” But heavily influenced by vested interests, including bus line owner Paul Martin, they ignored their own Rail Passenger Action Force’s warning: “We know of no other way to stop the drain of government funds to Via than to modernize the corporation; in fact, the only alternative is to scrap it completely.”

After reinstating several trains cut by the Liberals, the Tories rejected the recommendation that new, Canadian-built high-performance equipment be bought, which would have allowed it to transport more customers at a lower cost, thereby reducing its reliance on government subsidies. Instead, half of the system was hacked away in 1990, including Via’s Canadian on the CP route. It was ham-handedly combined with the former CN Super Continental and reduced from daily to tri-weekly, and then to bi-weekly, service for all but a few summer months.