CP Rail & Downtown Kamloops

Oct 2, 2015 | 5:45 PM

Has there ever been a more clearly unreasonable request to a local government than the one being made by Canadian Pacific Rail?

CP wants the City of Kamloops to close two main downtown accesses to Lorne Street, Riverside Park, and the Sandman Centre.

Why?

CP is worried that it’s getting too dangerous.

That would be a valid concern, but consider this.

When was the last time a person was injured or killed by a train, when it wasn’t the victim’s fault?

I can only think go one instance, and that’s Lac Megantic, an incident that doesn’t relate at all to this situation.

In all other incidents, the victim shouldn’t have been on the tracks, and got there because of a situation that could have been avoided.

If it’s intentional, there’s no way in the world you’re going to stop a person from getting hit by a train by closing a couple of crossings.

We all understand that trains can’t stop easily, and they can’t take evasive maneuvers, so you tangle with one and it’s not going to end well.

Why is Second and Third Avenue a unique situation?

What about areas like Dallas and Rayleigh where rail lines intersect busy collector roads?

Maybe, just maybe, this is about the CP yard being right in the middle of the city, when it should have picked up stakes and moved years ago, and the company’s annoyance at how tough it is to operate a busy rail yard in an urban downtown area.

In a perfect world, railroads would never intersect with vehicle or pedestrian crossings.

They’d be completely isolated.

People would never see or hear trains, and they wouldn’t have to worry about the safety hazards.

For train operators, they could go about their business without a care in the world.

In reality of course, roads do intersect with rail lines, and in this case, it’s ludicrous to think that the rail line should be the one that wins out.