As the province’s second foremost historian of the British Columbia Electric Railway Company Limited (BCER), and as a former B.C. Hydro public relations practitioner (1980-85), I am often bemused by rose-tinted glasses-wearing proponents of a rail-based Valley transit system connecting Chilliwack with other parts of the Greater Vancouver area using the old BCER Line.
When these starry-eyed pipe-dreamers start rambling on about using the old BCER line as a “reliable transit system (from Chilliwack) to Abbotsford, Langley and beyond” as letter-writer Don Davis promulgates in his specious (or space-ious) “Time travel” (The News, Feb.18), I have to wonder about the idealistic perspectives that some transit advocates have adopted that have no understanding of provincial politics and transit realities.
I should point out that the BCER line that he is referring to has been known as the Chilliwack Line or the Fraser Valley Line or District Three over the past 110 years. The 108-year-old corridor is owned by B.C. Hydro but has provided running rights to Southern Railway of B.C. on all 64 miles of it, while both the CPR and CNR have running and management rights on part of it (from Livingston Junction at 232nd Street to just south of Cloverdale) which could never be used for any form of passenger rail service for a variety of reasons.
This transit revitalization pipe dream has been raised many, many times since 1950 – first by myself back in the 1980s while working for B.C. Hydro’s public affairs division, then since 2001 by the now Cloverdale-based Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society, and for the past half dozen years by Rail for the Valley, an obscure advocacy group of individuals who have no political weight at any level nor expertise in mass transit. RFTV funded a highly simplistic $30,000 study entitled, “Proposal for Rail for the Valley”, written by Surrey (England) based LeeWood Projects.
That 2010 study did not even consider ridership projections and grossly underestimated the hundreds of millions of dollars that it would cost to re-electrify the meandering rail line that was originally designed for linking Valley communities back in 1910, some of which are nowhere near current population centres.
Even B.C. Hydro has carried out a study on the revitalization of the Fraser Valley Line for passenger rail and has found the cost too exorbitant to even consider.
I would be willing to show a film to Mr. Davis and other interested interurban rail buffs – a ride on the old BCER Interurban back in the late 1940s – that was part of a 90-minute television program that I produced and hosted back in 1983 with BCER historian Henry Ewert, and which has not been seen since. We could certainly entertain a debate on not going back to the future of 1950. Passenger service on that BCER line ended 65 years ago and it will never happen again.
G.E. MacDonell,
Abbotsford