Canada's Rail Revival Runs Into the Tracks It Already Lost

Canada is committing billions to expand passenger rail, but communities pushing to get their trains back are working with a railway shaped by decades of freight-first decisions. Torn-up tracks and lost corridors mean the network a town wants restored is not the one that still exists.

That's the structural problem underneath the enthusiasm in communities like St. Thomas, Ontario — the self-styled "Railway City" — where the desire for service runs up against infrastructure that was dismantled or reoriented around freight. Expanding passenger rail, on this account, is less about adding trains to a line and more about rebuilding the conditions that would let a line exist at all.