Committee says residents should be the focus of rail travel discussions

The Committee Promoting Muskoka Rail Travel (CPMRT) held a town hall meeting in Bracebridge last week for Muskoka residents to voice their opinions as well as learn about the work the committee is doing to promote the return of passenger rail service to the area.

In addition to CPMRT members, which include Lucille Frith and David Powley (Co-Chairs), Eric Boutilier (NEORN – Northern and Eastern Ontario Rail Network), Michael Lawley (Executive Director, Muskoka Tourism), and John Klinck (Chair, District Municipality of Muskoka), the town hall was attended by 61 residents from across Muskoka.

“People came from as far away as Orillia, Port Carling, Killarney, Dwight, and Gravenhurst,” said Frith. “They were a very interested group who had all the right reasons why they wanted to see the passenger train reinstated.”

Frith said that one of the primary messages the committee heard at the meeting was the needs of residents.

“One of the first things we heard was that in municipalities we should not always be catering to getting tourists here, we should be catering to getting our residents somewhere else that they need to go… It could be as simple as going to visit their family or going to a medical appointment or going down to an event in Toronto – our residents need just as much care and concern as the tourists who bring the dollars up,” said Frith. “We are not proposing huge investments for tourism, but the tourism will come as well because trains go two ways. It’s more important to consider what we can do for our residents.”

Other comments that arose at the meeting included the difficulty post-secondary students may have commuting to their schools, particularly in the north, and the growing trend of people moving further north to find affordable housing but still needing options for commuting to their jobs.

“John Klinck stressed the need to tell Ontario that we need passenger rail service (in Muskoka),” said Frith, adding that many of the former Ontario Northland rail passengers got on and off at the stations to the south of North Bay, even though its mandate was the north. “(Passengers in the south) were the incidental revenue that kept them going.”

The committee is collecting comments via a survey until September 10 that it will then present to the Northern Ontario Multimodal Transportation Study (NOMTS). “We want to say to them, ‘your decisions in Northern Ontario are going to impact us for years and that’s important,'” said Frith.

CPMRT isn’t focusing only on the return of Ontario Northland as an option, however, said Frith. They are also working to convince Metrolinx to do a test run of a GO train further north. “The CPMRT feels strongly that there are other ways and the first step may be to get GO North, as I’m calling it, organized and do a trial run just like they did for the Highway 11 bus to prove it worked.

“We need to be able to prove to the government of Ontario that this is a viable operation and that they need to invest in the north.”

You can complete the CPMRT survey here until September 10.

The discussions about passenger rail service are continuing just as Huntsville’s train station is proposed to be sold to a group of local businessmen for two dollars. They say that they would welcome passenger rail service in their plans to create a community hub. (Read that story here.) Huntsville’s Town Council will make a final decision on the sale at its regular meeting tonight, August 28.

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