First VIA Siemens trainsets begin serving Toronto
By Bob Johnston | October 24, 2023Tuesday event features Champagne ceremony
TORONTO — After months of service limited to a handful of round-trips regularly operating between Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City, a VIA Rail Canada Venture trainset made its Toronto debut Tuesday, rolling into the company’s Toronto Maintenance Centre Tuesday after bringing passengers from Ottawa on train no. 41.
The first trip was celebrated with a champagne christening ceremony featuring VIA CEO Mario Péloquin; Yves Desjardins-Siciliano, former VIA CEO and now CEO of Siemens Mobility Canada; and Michael Cahill, president, Rolling Stock North America, Siemens Mobility Inc.
For those interested in riding the new equipment, VIA has published a list of Venture trainset assignments on a special section of its website,
but it only lists origin and destination, train numbers, and days of
the week, not departure times. According to that listing, there will for
now be only one daily round trip serving Toronto, from Ottawa. But
trains to which the equipment is assigned vary by day of the week. And
some of the trains listed on that page did not appear on the ticketing
portion of VIA’s website as of Tuesday afternoon.
The Toronto-Ottawa schedule is above at left. For now, most of the new equipment is in other corridor service, most commonly on Ottawa-Quebec City trains.
