Rail stoppage: Montreal commuters eye alternatives as trains halted for second day

MONTREAL — Karina Andone considered her options to get to her job in downtown Montreal, after a stoppage at Canada’s two biggest railways halted commuter trains for a second consecutive day on Friday.

Car, then city bus, then subway? Maybe drive to a different train station, where there might be a better chance of finding parking, to catch a shuttle?

Andone, a resident of the off-island Montreal suburb of Île-Perrot, says there aren’t any replacement buses planned from the station she uses and it’s not feasible to drive downtown because of heavy traffic and high parking prices.

“As commuters, we are caught in a very bad situation,” she said.

Public transport system Exo has suspended rail service on the Vaudreuil-Hudson, Saint-Jérôme and Candiac lines, all of which use tracks owned by Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. Following months of increasingly fraught bargaining, CPKC and Canadian National Railway Co. locked out workers on Thursday after the two sides failed to reach a deal by 12:01 a.m.

Canada’s labour minister has asked the Canada Industrial Relations Board to impose binding arbitration to resolve the dispute — but Exo said Friday it’s not clear when the train service will resume.

“We are awaiting instructions from the CPKC, the owner of the railway lines on which we are unable to operate trains, before deciding on the terms and timing of the resumption of commuter train service,” a spokesman for Exo wrote in an email, noting that the Teamsters union at CPKC has challenged the directive for binding arbitration to the country’s labour board.

Exo says it will have some buses for customers up and running by Monday, but warns that it won’t have enough to fully replace the suspended train service because of “limited financial and operational capacity.” The three lines carry some 21,000 passengers a day.

Exo’s two train lines that run on the CN network have not been shut down because its rail traffic controllers are not part of the lockout.

Andone said she has been able to work from home this week, but is due back in the office on Monday. Compounding her troubles are the traffic woes caused by roadwork on a major bridge west of Montreal, the fact that she starts work at 7:15 a.m., when transit runs less frequently, and the near-impossibility of finding parking near bus stations.

“They want to encourage us to take public transit, but they make it impossible for us to do it,” she said.

For Sandra Bélanger, who lives in Blainville, north of Montreal, the Exo disruptions are just the latest in a series of problems that have made taking public transit a headache.

She said the closure of the downtown Montreal Lucien-L’Allier train station this year for extensive repairs meant her commute went from one hour each way to one and a half. She estimates that having to take Exo’s shuttle next week would add at least another 20 minutes to that, each way.

“It’s becoming a little bit unlivable for workers, because you can’t forget that we have children,” Bélanger said. She’s having to rely on her parents to pick up her child from daycare, because she can’t make it home on time. “It’s becoming really impossible,” she said.

Instead of taking the shuttle, she’s planning to drive to a subway station in Laval, Que., and leave her car there if train service isn’t back up and running on Monday — which she says means arriving by 6:30 a.m. to ensure she can get a parking spot.

“It’s more than frustrating because I don’t feel like I live far out in the countryside,” she said of her town located 35 kilometres northwest of downtown Montreal. “It’s not that far.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 23, 2024.

Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press