Rob. Bredin “Man made the train, To carry a heavy load...”

— Van Morrison (from James Brown, 1963 and, later bluesmen Bobby Bland & Junior Wells) P rior to the federal election call, I had a chance to speak with Dean Del Mastro, MP (CPeterborough), in Ottawa. He is the harddriving chairman of the parliamentary Rail Caucus. At 60 MPs this is the largest all-party caucus on Parliament Hill. Mr. Del Mastro has been the principal force behind having November 7 declared National Railway Day in Canada. The Del Mastro family, coming as immigrants from Italy, has had men working on either the CNR or CPR throughout great chunks of the 20th Century.

Mr. Del Mastro was the federal government’s representative late last year for the ceremony commemorating the 125th anniversary of the driving of the “last spike” in British Columbia, which the Scotsman Donald A. Smith (Lord Strathcona) did for us historically, completing an impossible dreamtype construction project that both saved Canada and held it together through our first, formative century. Anyone can see how very important to nation-building the advent of an integrated rail network was, particularly to the making of Canada, and to the serving of Ontario which used to be mainly allrural, always impassable for many times during the year, and all-timbered for a wood hungry world, by having read the archive news reports from the 1880s, carried each week, by this paper. These make for some of the finest reading around, and give a real sense of how our nation arose and how our province got its array of agricultural and forestry products to various markets.

Mr. Del Mastro has been impressively successful as well, through hard work, four detailed reports, and an exclusive focus, in getting a budgetary commitment in 2008 — “one of only seven” — under the Ontario Building Canada Agreement, for the scheduled re-commissioning of former CP Toronto- Ottawa mainline tracking to its “existing end” at Havelock, where there will be a new industrial operation, Kawartha Ethanol, which will make an environmentally “friendly” fuel supplement made from an agricultural crop, this time the betterthought out canola rather than maize. Initial production will be in the range of 20 million litres a year. The plan is to have the trains run,“hopefully on this bio-diesel”, which will be, thus, locallysourced.

The rail commitment is worth $150 million. This will allow passenger train service from Peterborough, south through Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s, industrially hard-pressed federal riding of Whitby-Oshawa, and into Toronto by as soon as next year.

A complete overhaul of the rolling-stock is planned and speeds of up to 100 m.p.h. will be possible along the route. Anyone who has attempted to get into the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in a car from the east any weekday morning in recent years knows such an initiative is sorely needed to begin, at least, to ease chronic, extensive, and perpetualseeming traffic congestion.

Mr. Del Mastro says many major barriers and obstacles were raised by Premier McGuinty’s provincial Liberals. “The truth of the matter is ... that lots of hurdles have been thrown at (the project), and the(se) come from Queen’s Park.” He maintains a return to rail transport and passenger travel will have a “significant economic impact in parts of rural Ontario.”

He is nothing if not a determined campaigner, as well, against what has been begun recently — essentially — as the unfortunate advent of “truck trains” on Ontario’s 400-series highways, permitted by the McGuinty government.

Passing one the other day — Mr. Del Mastro says they can, in practice, be up to 130 feet in length — proved to make it almost impossible for me, as a seeming-wall of coiled steel wire hogged the exit lane for the Collectors on the 401, from accessing the ramp to the 410, its doubled trailer going at just the wrong, and impassable, speed.

These out-of-place ‘trains’ now can carry 80,000 pounds of cargo but, with “no public consultation”, Queen’s Park is looking to increase this weight by as much as 50 per cent.

The 20 companies that hold licences in Ontario to run these ‘trains’ across the public highways form a highly effective lobby group, and with their licensing pay for only approximately 6 per cent of the enormous deterioration, damage, and depreciation that they cause to our major roadways, which is compounded by winter frosts and spring thawing.

By having these growing ‘trains’ on our exorbitantly expensive and congestion-choked GTA-area highways, Mr. Del Mastro says, Premier McGuinty is, in Ontario, yet again, “doing exactly what he said he would never do.”