‘Not an experience we ever wish to deliver’ for passengers stuck on trains overnight: Via Rail executive

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OTTAWA — Via Rail executives apologized to passengers who were stranded on trains overnight following a massive winter storm that caused widespread travel disruptions over the Christmas holidays.

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“I understand the experience they had, and it is not an experience we ever wish to deliver,” Michael Brankley, Via Rail’s vice-president of railway operations, said Thursday while appearing before a Parliamentary committee investigating the delays.

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Conservative MP Shelby Kramp-Neuman said at the meeting of the House of Commons transport committee that there were “points in time where passengers actually felt like they were prisoners.”

The committee is studying delays, cancellations and other issues experienced by thousands of Canadians travelling by plane and train over the holidays. On Jan. 12, the committee heard from airline executives, who similarly apologized, and from Transport Minister Omar Alghabra. Consumer and air passenger advocates are appearing this afternoon.

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Martin Landry, Via Rail’s interim president and chief executive officer, said the Crown corporation hadn’t experienced such an event in the past 25 years.

“It wasn’t necessarily linked to the snow itself or the snow accumulation. It was really linked to the power failures that took effect. And obviously the infrastructure depends on electricity,” he said.

MPs on the committee dug into the specific case of train 55, which was stuck for 18 hours near Coburg, Ont., after a tree fell on the train. Passengers were left with non-functioning washrooms and a dwindling emergency supply of food and water, which they had to pay for.

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Via Rail representatives outlined a series of factors that contributed to the situation:

• The tree had fallen in such a way that the train couldn’t move without it going through the windows.

• Crew that was dispatched to clear the tree got into an accident.

• A creek blocked a possible evacuation to a residential area that was only a few minutes away.

• Staff on the train failed to follow protocols that would have seen passengers given free food and water.

At one point, Via Rail mistakenly told the passengers the tree had been removed. “That was due to a communication issue we’d had with CN, so we provided the wrong information to the passengers directly,” chief customer officer Rita Toporowski said. “Obviously, they didn’t take it well because they saw that the tree was still there. So that’s a failure on that part.”

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She said normally the company would obtain additional emergency food from the nearest station, or have it delivered from local restaurants, but in this case that wasn’t possible because the train was not accessible.

“Train 55 was a very unique situation,” Toporowski said.

Passengers who were stuck on board shouldn’t have been charged for food, she said. “Once again that’s a failure on our part and it caused anxiety to the passengers on board. So for that I apologize.”

Toporowski said she couldn’t answer questions about whether those passengers were refunded. “I don’t believe we’ve been able to identify who that was,” she said.