May 30, 2013

VIA Rail Canada publishes its 2013 First Quarter Financial Report

Ridership increases by 9.2% on most popular routes:
Québec City – Montréal – Ottawa – Toronto

Montréal, May 30, 2013 - VIA Rail Canada’s (viarail.ca) Board of Directors today released the Corporation’s 2013 first quarter financial report. "2013 will be the first year during which VIA Rail will be able to measure the impact of frequency adjustments made in 2012, and so far, things are looking promising”, said Marc Laliberté, president and CEO of VIA Rail. “We are confident that by staying focused on providing a travel experience that meets passengers' expectations of comfort, reliability, affordability and the benefit of productive and connected travel time, our ridership will continue to grow on key markets."

In the Québec City – Montréal – Ottawa – Toronto Corridor, where VIA Rail added train frequencies, there was a significant increase in passengers of 9.2% as compared to the first quarter of 2012. While VIA Rail’s overall ridership remained steady on its whole network, reaching 936,000 travellers compared to 934,000 for the same period in 2012, passenger-miles (the total number of miles travelled by all passengers) during the first quarter of 2013 increased 4.9%, up from 176 million in the first quarter of 2012 to 184 million in 2013.

Highlights of the first quarter of 2013 include:

Trains

Completion of the conceptual design work to our Head End Power (HEP-1) redesigned fleet of sleeper cars, used on the Canadian service travelling between Toronto and Vancouver;
Progression of the work on the Light, Rapid, Comfortable (LRC) business and coach cars used in the corridor;
Delivery of three out of six Rail Diesel Cars (RDC) dedicated to the remote services;

Technology

VIA Rail reaching over 82,000 Facebook fans;
Launching of the all-Canadian On-board Entertainment System that will provide passengers on VIA Rail trains within the Québec City – Windsor corridor free access to Canadian programming, including current news, television programs and series from CBC/Radio-Canada, documentaries and animation from the National Film Board, and "Heritage Minute" vignettes produced by The Historica-Dominion Institute.

To read VIA Rail’s quarterly financial results, go to: viarail.ca/en/about-via-rail/our-company/quarterly-reports/2013-first-quarter.

About VIA Rail Canada
As Canada's national passenger rail service, VIA Rail Canada (www.viarail.ca) has a mandate to provide Canadian travellers with safe, efficient, and cost-effective passenger transportation services in the country's two official languages. VIA operates intercity, regional and transcontinental train services linking 450 communities through its 12,500-kilometre network. Winner of the 2011 RAC Safety Award, VIA Rail safely transports more than four million passengers annually. In 2007, the Government of Canada invested almost a billion dollars in VIA Rail. Follow our transformation on viarail.ca/transformingVIA.