When Metrolinx Hooked Up with European Rail Experts, the Result Was a “Slow-motion Train Wreck”

For the latest edition of our Sources podcast, Ontario reporter Eric Wickham spoke to The Trillium’s Jack Hauen about the far-reaching consequences of the many big, beautiful bills Doug Ford’s government has recently been pushing.

They also got talking about Hauen’s recent investigation into the transit agency Metrolinx and how it largely gave up on an ambitious plan to evolve GO Transit’s train service into a European-style rail network. We couldn’t quite fit that discussion into the structure of the episode but still want to share it with you, as we think it provides solid insight into the state of Ontario’s regional transit. As such, please enjoy this edited transcript.

ERIC WICKHAM: Your piece focuses on the multi-billion-dollar GO Expansion project and the seemingly sudden dropping of a partner, Deutsche Bahn. Can you give me some insight into what this GO Expansion project was supposed to be?

JACK HAUEN: Yeah, so not a lot of people know about GO Expansion, which is not the sexiest name for a project. I certainly didn’t know about it. A few years ago, I went to Italy and took the train everywhere, and, you know, you’d hop on, you’d just go to the station and show up and you’d get on a train to a totally different city. I came back and I thought, “Damn, wouldn’t it be nice if this existed in Ontario?”

And wouldn’t you know it, it was under construction, but I had no idea about it. So that’s essentially the vision for GO Expansion: it’s turning the GO train system in Southern Ontario into somewhere that you can “turn up and go,” as they call it — so trains every 15 minutes running along every line, electrified. At peak service, the highest-order plan was for trains every three to eight minutes, like an express subway, getting from Union Station to Brampton in like 20 minutes. So it’s a hugely expansive and ambitious plan, but things have started to go off the rails.

📣 We’re taking GO service to unprecedented levels! GO Expansion will enable:
➡️ Trips as often as every 3-8 mins during peak hours
➡️ Faster rides with trains travelling 140km/h
➡️ Commute times cut by an avg. of 10 mins.

Details: https://t.co/cQLA6mipJ8 #MXItsHappening pic.twitter.com/QGXKQv9Ibr

— Metrolinx (@Metrolinx) April 21, 2022

What is Deutsche Bahn, and how were they working with GO on this expansion project?

Deutsche Bahn is the state railway company in Germany, and they were brought in by Metrolinx in 2022. When GO Expansion kicked off in earnest, the Ford government was backing it enthusiastically, and Metrolinx was putting out press releases and blog posts about it. They were saying, you know, “It’s going to be like London, it’s going to be like Tokyo, it’s going to be amazing.”

They brought in these Germans to run the trains, to do operations and maintenance. And there are a bunch of other companies involved, because of course it’s a giant conglomerate public-private-partnership thing. But Deutsche Bahn was perhaps the major player — certainly the major player in the actual running of the trains.

What’s hard to understand for people outside of North America is that the culture around rail here is largely from the freight world, and it’s a lot different than the European style of train service. So GO, as anyone who has taken it knows, functions pretty well as a way to get people in and out of downtown Toronto during rush hour. And it’s functioned that way for decades, since the 60s. And a lot of people at GO and at Metrolinx are really proud of that and don’t really see — sources told me — a good reason to change that. And so suddenly these Germans come in and start telling them how to do stuff, and it didn’t go well, people on the inside said.

What happened to then bring this partnership to an end? Was there an inciting incident, or was it just over time?

Thank you for teeing me up to say “train wreck.” That was my lede, that it was a slow-motion train wreck. But basically, it just never was a good work environment, from what I’ve heard from people who worked on the project and close to it. There would be these meetings, endless meetings about anything or many things that Deutsche Bahn proposed.

Metrolinx would come back to them, often with new requirements, and so people said it was essentially impossible for Deutsche Bahn to get anything done and actually across the finish line. There’s a culture where anyone at Metrolinx could say no to something, but in order for stuff to be approved, it had to go way up, often to the CEO. And it was just a really tough and acrimonious work environment.

Deutsche Bahn thought it was being brought on to take a leadership role. People came from all over Western Europe to work on this thing. People were really stoked, and bit by bit their enthusiasm was sort of ground down in many different scenarios. So, Metrolinx internally — because they won’t say much externally — told employees in town halls that Deutsche Bahn failed to meet its objectives: that they didn’t deliver what they said they were going to deliver on the dates that they said they were going to deliver them.

Internally also, Metrolinx described to its employees a series of scaling-backs of the project: decreasing the speed of some trains, decreasing the frequency, abandoning platform upgrades. And the way that this was framed to employees in internal town halls was, “Why bother building infrastructure that you’re not going to need for a few decades, right now? We’ve got cost issues, we’ve got to scope this down. We’ve got to pull back a bit.”

So GO Expansion is still happening. It’s still going to be eventually, they say, 15 minutes in all directions, two-way, all day. So it still will be a “turn up and go,” but certain aspects of it — like how it’ll be electrified, when it’ll be electrified, which parts are going to get service first — have been scaled back to what they called a “minimum viable product,” which is not exactly the most inspiring way to put it.

And Deutsche Bahn, publicly, the only thing that they would say is they were cut from the project after a “significant realignment” of the scope.