Ontario Construction News staff writer
The Ontario government says its has reached an agreement-in-principle with CN Rail to buy land to construct dedicated GO tracks on the Kitchener Line, marking a milestone in the province’s plan to build faster transit between Kitchener and Toronto.
The agreement coincides with additional GO train service that will be added to the Kitchener Line in November, including 18 new weekend trips between Bramalea GO and Union Station, as well as the first-ever weekend service to Kitchener.
“Today, we’re taking two pivotal steps towards delivering two-way, all-day GO train service between Kitchener and Toronto,” Prabmeet Sarkaria, Minister of Transportation said in a statement that did not specify when the land would be purchased.
The agreement is the latest step to build faster two-way, all-day rapid service on the Kitchener Line as part of the Kitchener extension project, which will add 40 km of new, two-way track and includes track re-alignments, signal upgrades, bridge work and platform expansion along the corridor.
Large sections of the track GO trains run on between Kitchener and Toronto are owned by CN Rail, which allows the province to run passenger service when it doesn’t’ conflict with freight schedules.
Ontario has said it ultimately wants 15-minute service on the part of the line between Toronto and Bramalea where Metrolinx already owns the track. Trains out to Mount Pleasant GO would run every 30 minutes, and routes running to Kitchener would be every hour.
Beginning at the end of November, the government will ramp up service on the track section it owns between Toronto and Bramalea.
