First VIA Siemens trainsets begin serving Toronto

By Bob Johnston | October 24, 2023

Tuesday event features Champagne ceremony

The third time’s a charm: After two previous tries, former VIA CEO 

Yves Desjardins-Siciliano 

successfully smashes a bottle on the front coupler of a Charger 

locomotive while current CEO 

Mario Péloquin and Siemens’ Michael Cahill look on during ceremonies

 marking the start of

Toronto service by Siemens Venture trainsets. Dave Brook

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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.

The first VIA Rail Canada Venture trainset to serve Toronto, 

train No. 41 from Ottawa,

 arrives at the Toronto Maintenence Centre for Tuesday’s event. 

Dave Brook

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