Railway repairs remain far off

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/07/2017 (3017 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It looks like Omnitrax didn’t get the memo.

For the past eight weeks, the Denver-based owners of the Hudson Bay Railway have been repeatedly urged to take stock of the situation and make necessary repairs to get the trains moving again on northern Manitoba’s most important transportation link. The line was shut down on May 23 because of significant flood damage.

In what has to be seen now as stark defiance of those pleas for urgency, Omnitrax will confirm this week that it is still weeks away from the start of repairs.

On Tuesday, Omnitrax will hold a technical briefing with engineering firm AECOM, at which it will announce the assessment of the damage to the rail line is not yet complete. “The final report from AECOM will not be available for another two to three weeks, and we will not be able to share any final conclusions until then,” an Omnitrax spokeswoman confirmed Sunday.

That time frame is consistent with statements Omnitrax made in late June that it would take until late July or early August to examine 24 breaks, 28 damaged bridges and more than 600 culverts over a 300-kilometre span of the rail line.

However, there had been a growing expectation that, after being strongly enjoined by Premier Brian Pallister and northern First Nation and municipal leaders to speed up the process, Omnitrax would get repairs started sooner. The urgency was due in no small part to the fact that the tab for re-supplying Churchill and related entities has been growing at an alarming rate.

Churchill Mayor Mike Spence said in an interview that Manitoba’s Emergency Measures Organization (EMO) has been keeping tabs on the costs of bringing in critical supplies such as propane and materials to complete important repairs to municipal facilities.

EMO has now estimated the cost of bringing propane and new long-term storage tanks to Churchill by ship from Montreal at more than $4 million, he said. Another $400,000 would have to be spent to bring in roofing materials to complete work on the town offices and medical centre.

VIA Rail is looking at a $700,000 tab to have two locomotives and five passenger cars — stranded in Churchill when the line was closed — shipped back south.

However, the biggest re-supply costs are accruing to the University of Manitoba’s Marine Observatory, a government-funded research centre. Construction of the observatory was put on hold when the rail service stopped and Spence said it could cost as much as $8 million to bring in the necessary building materials by ship, more than double original estimates.

With the cost of essential materials rising on a weekly basis, news that Omnitrax is sticking to its original timeline for the engineering assessment was greeted with a predictable anger.

“This is garbage,” said Spence. “This is totally unacceptable. Ten weeks to do an assessment on the line? That’s total garbage given the problems we are having right now.”

Garbage is a pretty strong word but Omnitrax’s behaviour has been, at the very least, extremely odd in several different ways.

First, the technical briefing was announced on Friday afternoon with little fanfare. That is typically the way governments “take out the garbage,” political parlance for an effort to bury a news release to avoid media scrutiny.

It’s not clear why Omnitrax would want to suppress interest in the briefing, but that’s pretty much what happened. Not a single local news outlet reported on the briefing.

Second, Omnitrax seems to have forgotten to include Churchill officials. Spence said he received no notification from Omnitrax directly, and only learned about the briefing from a journalist. “They have been doing a pretty good job of ignoring us,” Spence said. “This is just the latest example of the bad faith they show us at every turn.”

Third, Spence said there is no evidence the railway has begun repairing any flood-damaged sections of the line. Even if it will take a few more weeks to complete the engineering assessment, Spence said there really is no reason why some repairs could not have been already started.

Spence noted that in late June, the Keewatin Railway Company, a shortline operator controlled by the Keewatin Tribal Council, had already volunteered to start repairs and estimated the total cost of bringing the line back into service at about $2 million.

It’s important to note that what Spence has described as bad faith is also a deliberate strategy to ramp up the pressure on the federal and provincial governments to buy them out.

Omnitrax has a tentative deal with a First Nations consortium to sell the railway and port of Churchill, which it also owns. However, the consortium has made it clear that they cannot complete the sale without financial support from Ottawa.

And if Omnitrax has been about bad faith, Ottawa has been all about silence.

Federal officials are being kept abreast of all the most recent developments, or lack of developments as the case may be. But the federal Liberal government is not offering to take a leadership role to get the rail line back up and running, either under Omnitrax control or as part of a sale to First Nations.

The province as well has been very tight-lipped on any financial support to an existing or future owner of the railway. Pallister has been resolute that he will make no commitments until he knows the total cost of repairs.

It’s a classic standoff: a private owner that no longer wants to own the railway and is refusing to do any repairs facing off against the federal and provincial governments, both of which are reluctant to put any money on the table. And caught in the middle are the good people of the north.

“I’ve said for some time that all that Omnitrax is doing is holding us hostage,” Spence said. “They’re putting the squeeze on us to see what they can get from government. And we’re sick and tired of it.”

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca