A golden opportunity has presented itself to turn the almost dormant 220-kilometre E&N rail line on Vancouver Island into a multi-use trail network without a rail line, according to Cowichan's David Slade.
Slade, vice-president of Friends of Rails to Trails Vancouver Island, told the board at the Cowichan Valley Regional District at its meeting on May 14 that trails are cheap to build, and it has been estimated that converting the spur line that runs between Duncan and Lake Cowichan to trails would cost approximately $1.2 million.
“That’s pretty economical for 27 kilometres of trail conversion, but when we talk about a trail beside an existing rail bed where it’s possible, It’s 10 to 100 times as expensive.”
Slade pointed out that the Allegheny Passage trail system in Pennsylvania is very similar in length to the E&N rail line with similar settlement patterns and it draws more than a million visitors every year.
He said the Allegheny Passage economic impact report from 2019 indicated that the trail system resulted in $121 million U.S. in direct and indirect impacts that year, and it supports almost 1,400 jobs along its length.
Passenger train service on the E&N rail line was stopped in 2011 due to track-safety concerns, and freight service has also been discontinued on most parts of the Island as well.
The Stantec consulting group presented a comprehensive report on the rail line to the CVRD in February that examined the costs and challenges of establishing the rail corridor as either rail only, trail only and a combination of rail and trail.
The report said that studies have identified that the fixed costs to reinstate rail service on the corridor are very high.
Slade highlighted some of the report's findings, including that having rail with trails would be difficult or impractical, and the line must be contiguous from Courtenay to Victoria but it already is non-contiguous in a number of places due to First Nations having other plans for the land the rail lines are on going through their properties.
He said, unlike rail, a trail system could just go around reserve lands.
“There’s only less than 10 kilometres of reserve land on the almost 300 kilometres of corridor and in every case, there’s paved roads that can easily take hikers and cyclists around those reservations,” Slade said
“So it’s an obstruction to trains, but not to trails. We’ve been waiting for 14 years for the train that may never come. Do we keep waiting or pursue an exciting plan B?”
North Cowichan Mayor Rob Douglas said the Stantec report states that if the rail line was decommissioned and the land use changed to trail only, it would trigger soil remediation.
He said the estimate in the report is that the cost of the soil remediation would be between $76 million and $225 million, on top of the $55 million estimate to actually build the trails.
Slade said he was disappointed with Stantec’s calculations.
He said Stantec made the assumption that for the most part, the ballast, which is the crushed stone or gravel that forms the base for railway tracks, would be contaminated along the rail line and would have to be removed and replaced.
“That hasn’t been the case in the Okanagan Rail Trail and North Okanagan Rail Trail in which virtually no soil remediation was required, so I don’t know why they believe that it would be the case here,” Slade said.
“I think we just need to remove the ties and rails, grade the ballast and just keep on using what is already there. I think the actual cost of soil remediation would be somewhere close to nothing.”
