Rob: Another day, another study into a potential passenger rail service linking Calgary and Banff, maybe with a few stops along the way. What are the details on this feasibility study announced this week?

Tanya: The study is being done in collaboration between the Province of Alberta and the Canada Infrastructure Bank. All of the discussion around passenger rail in Banff has been at the municipal and community level. Liricon Capital is involved, the Town of Banff, the Town of Canmore.  Liricon on their own has done feasibility studies as well. But in order for this to actually become a reality the province and the federal government would have to come on board.

Rob: It just seems like one of those things that they just keep studying and studying, and I’m kind of getting to the point where like, okay, let’s commit or not, but you know, how many more studies we need to do to determine whether this is feasible?

Tanya: I think we can definitely reach study burnout, but at each level a more due diligence is needed. This is a feasibility study from higher levels of government being asked to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars towards something. There is work that those levels of government have to do to understand what they would be contributing money towards. We have to understand how many people will use this and how they’ll use it a little better in order to understand how to set it up for success.

I want to champion the fact that we have one of the best local transit systems already with Roam through the Bow Valley Regional Transit Commission, the first one of its kind in all of Alberta where municipalities work together. I think that this passenger rail idea could use a similar model and find success where each municipality is involved, whereas we would need the province and the federal government to pay to help build it and establish it.

Rob: Yeah, but you also touch on something else comparing a train system to a bus system, because we already know some things from the last study. We know that although Liricon has shored up some investment to get this started, the setting up a train service like this, building entirely new rail line adjacent to the existing one between Calgary and Banff, would cost upwards of $660 million. We have a good idea of what it would cost to operate that annually. We also know that setting up a more robust regional bus system to get people from Calgary to the Bow Valley and back would be significantly cheaper. So I’m wondering what the upside of spending so much money is when we already have a regional transit service that could be potentially expanded to include the Calgary area for a fraction of the cost of a train.

Tanya:  On top of that, to have a train system there needs to be train stations and those  need land. There needs to be someone paying for their operations as well. Whereas a bus service could drop people off at a currently established transit hubs. I fully expect this feasibility study to consider other options as well.

I think that this is going to be a really big conversation because we definitely see a push for passenger rail from Liricon, who has leased the train station, has renovated it, has added parking, all towards seeing this vision come to fruition of passenger rail returning to Banff. There’s definitely a driver within this from the private sector.

Filed under: Banff, Canmore, Mountain Insider