A few months ago, I posted a video on how reliable transit to the Valley is miserable. There really isn’t a good excuse for it other than TransLink not wanting to play ball with CPKC, CNR, and SRYBC due to funding and due to a lack of focus on anything outside of its jurisdiction.

As it stands right now, the only railway station you can get to in the Fraser Valley with regular cadence is Mission City, but it only gets a handful of trains per day and they’re only set up for commuting.

In the map above, you can see an area circled in green on the left. That is the existing Mission City station. Annoyingly, it’s after a junction with no realistic connection to Abbotsford, which is south (pointed at using the green arrow).

When the West Coast Express was built, Mission was the terminus and BC Transit shoehorned any attempts at future expansion thanks to this station placement. Granted, this might have to do with CPKC telling them they could put a station there, but there is a something annoying to point out.

Prior to the late 1990s, there was an attempt to save the above building, formerly known as Mission Junction. It was about a few hundred metres away around the junction, but burnt down due to a combination of neglect and arson. Essentially at one point, Mission had three railway stations in and around its city centre, but is now down to two.

However, I think we can fix this and do so rather inexpensively.

If we zoom out of the map from earlier, we can see the southern shore of the Fraser River and another junction. This is where the CPKC, CNR, and SRYBC all meet. The purple angle you see at the bottom is the link which takes you out towards Chilliwack with the southern railways going towards Abbotsford city centre and then the United States by way of Sumas.

At the intersection of Essendene Avenue and W. Railway Street, we are greeted with a parking lot. This is a huge waste of land, but an opportunity to place a railway station with a siding. This could be the WCE’s new terminus to Abbotsford.

Flying out to Chilliwack, we find ourselves at Young Road near Fifth Avenue. This is in fact the pre-existing Chilliwack station for Via Rail. Why not make it less horrible and make it another WCE station?

This of course leaves us with a problem: are we going to run trains with three termini then? No. That is a bad idea. It would thin out service greatly and would create a disservice to Mission residents who use the WCE.

Let’s move the existing Mission City Station a kilometre and a bit west and create a new station around some big box stores. There is ample room around here.

These stations do not need to be elaborate at all. They don’t need an overpass over the tracks at least at the onset and for the most part have reasonable bus connections.

As covered in the video I made back during the summer, I mentioned that TransLink has in the past ran more intense service even on weekends with the WCE. Passenger rail service on these tracks are not unheard of and historically have existed.

It would require more trains to run, but there is room even downtown for these trains.

In this 2009 study by the City of Vancouver, it makes mention of a “potential additional transit line” being an option for Waterfront station. Four platforms would be available to handle all of the trains that could be used to run out to the Valley.

Scheduling these trains and what trains to run are another story, but the options are there to build our region a proper rail service as opposed to this pitiful one we have here today.

I suspect that the reason for why we’re not seeing this in the cards is because of much of the Fraser Valley not being part of TransLink. Mission is an anomaly for the transit agency as at the time, BC Transit offered service in Metro Vancouver when the WCE was introduced.

The Fraser Valley has had proposals created to contend this, but there is a consistent lobby that wants to make use of the old BC Electric interurban (mentioned in the linked document) which in my opinion is slow and does nothing to make a reasonable service. Just because legislation exists to enforce passenger travel rights on this track doesn’t mean it’s ever going to be useful.

One other problem is that when the BC Liberals (now BC United) had reorganized TransLink in 2007, they had included this little tidbit:

Falcon has also unveiled plans to expand TransLink’s scope to include roads, bridges and transit all the way from Pemberton, north of Whistler, to Hope, at the eastern end of the Fraser Valley.

He said the smaller outlying communities that are now not part of Translink would be asked but not forced to join. If they were to join, they would have to impose the gas tax that supports Translink, which will go up three cents a litre.

I suspect that Falcon (who is now the BCU leader) was banking on the Fraser Valley municipalities to jump onboard, but for political reasons never did. A decade and a half since this reorg, TransLink’s boundaries haven’t changed at all and today we remain with Mission as the lone municipality with any TransLink service but isn’t in its jurisdiction.

Anyway, politicking aside, this is doable and just requires political might to get it done. Since it is a politics issue, I am not holding my breath.